‘past life portrait’
— Nix Thérèse
I always love a poem that works more off image association than anything. The form here really allows its moments to float off by themselves, then into each other. The cinematic quality allows us to lean into being voyeurs and connect the dots. Being the person that I am, aka constantly water-locked, the shift in water quality across the poem interested me most, namely because there’s a marked difference in how the boy-bodies engage with water vs. the speaker’s.
The first three comparisons of the boys to water show intimacy. The boys splash around in the river until the smell of it sticks to their bodies. The tap runs down/across their mouths & throats and into the speaker’s. You can’t know water is cool unless you touch it in some capacity, right? There’s an interplay between these bodies of water taking the boy-bodies into themselves and vice versa, but this union doesn’t merge them completely. Even together, you know where one ends and the other begins, and the remnants of each in the other isn’t enough to cause any real shift.
With the speaker and their “bloody” water, the change feels irrevocable. Any drop of blood would be a notable shift in composition. This water feels more stagnant: even though the blood is probably swirling across it, I don’t imagine it moving across any space. Rather, it sucks in color and salt until it’s tinged with them. They co-mingle until separation can’t really exist. When your body is capable of staining & taking up more space than originally granted, you can defiantly lean into that possibility, but more often, the awareness makes you hold yourself together gingerly.
We can see why the speaker covets the boy-body in its singularity & ability to come back whole from any mouth. But I also wonder how we can love our “bloody water”, always flushed with our touch.