Gracilaria, or When She Grows A Whole New Body
Wendy Cannella
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
out of all the indifferences into one thing
—Wallace Stevens,
“Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”
Because I can’t think of —
this morning on Long Sands
I bend to lift up
a clump of seaweed, purple-red, cemented
into the muck where the wrack line ends—
or begins—this slick-slime clump, thick
stranded as a young girl’s hair, laced with sand,
gracilaria, because I can’t think of —
I dig up rockweed, knotted wrack,
can’t think of how dark it was about to get
September, sunset
when the boat flipped—
so I let these gritty ribbons
rasp the grooved pads of my fingers
I can’t stop breaking open
each glowing bladder, swollen—
one gasp each, their only breath,
because—
she built a lean-to out of broken branches,
invited each of us inside,
shell-blue glow of halogen bulbs
in the drafty garage of winter,
and a kind of life took shape
within the frozen night, a seed, a bubble,
a dwelling
in the evening air
in which being there together
is enough—
so now, when I find a rope
that snakes like a faded-green necklace
across the beach, I follow it
until the tide comes in, and wherever I walk
is soft as a belly and wet like eyes.
Wendy Cannella’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Salamander, Solstice, Rattle, and Rhino, among others. Her essay “Angels and Terrorists” is featured in The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn from Syracuse University Press. She served as chair for the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Project board of directors and was named a Maine Literary Award Finalist in 2019.