Voyage of Bodies
I want to say what I did not know before,
words never said,
a quest of love and devotion,
about people who walk miles together,
where there’s green on every side,
where sun’s first light moves through the Hill—
my true self traveling to the region within.
It is afternoon and I’m not afraid,
my children have left and I’m not young,
the sun is transparent on the window,
my husband is gone, gallivant,
he is beautiful and still strong,
there is no sequel—
Once I cried that we were under foot,
cocoons of ourselves,
merely locked in jars,
where nearby the clocks outlasted us,
where nearby the chains wore themselves.
—only the birds were their own direction—
Motion is the heart for inspiration,
without fear of hardening, loss of sight
or stripped heartbeat—
Motion takes us from the middle
to become the flow, the tides from the moon,
to write this poem,
not for the willful world which needs nothing,
but for its own movement.
Grace Cavalieri’s newest publication is a chapbook, Gotta Go Now (Casa Menendez, 2012). She’s the author of 16 books and chapbooks of poetry, as well as 28 produced plays, short-form and full-length. Her recent books—Millie’s Tiki Villas, Sounds Like Something I Would Say, and Anna Nicole: Poems—are on Kindle’s free lending library. For 35 years, Grace has produced and hosted “The Poet and the Poem” on public radio, recorded at the Library of Congress and transmitted nationally via NPR and Pacifica. She is the poetry columnist for The Washington Independent Review of Books. Her play “Anna Nicole: Blonde Glory” opened in NYC in 2011. Her play “Quilting the Sun” opened in S.C. in 2011.
