20 June 2016
Here’s a solstice poem I wrote a few years ago, memory of a solstice back when I was a girl of eighteen, enchanted with a beautiful boy 🙂
This poem appears in my book If We Could Know Our Bones, from A-Minor Press ❤
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Remembering the Body as Grace
We all live in a house on fire. Tennessee Williams
1
I dream back the hot slow sky your body was above me, goldleafed and dappled in early sun, in those running heated days of baggy shorts, thin shoulder straps, loosed barefoot in the woods, where the world wore the soft warm pelts we tumbled in, skins multicolored scarfs we slid out of, slid into, each other. We were hungering home.
2
I wore some long breezy skirt, thinking Stevie Nicks would approve; in those days music made our maps, At a party to honor the March stars, I sat in your lap on Alan’s floor, after too much tequila, naming fish, aquarium after aquarium lining old apartment walls. Outside, a vernal moon split the day in two perfect halves, calling the first point of my Aries into startling alignment with your laugh.
3
Thirty-one suns have crossed the celestial equator since then, science and memory rearranging, the Earth’s elliptical orbit, bending, changing, precession, axis tugged in another direction. Spring even now is being reduced by one minute per year, singing as it goes. Naked to the native acre, bone-clear, the body knows what it knows.
4
Age has freed us from any need to hide, that sweet surrender of knowing celestial objects near the celestial equator are visible worldwide.
5
Assuming the body as love, my body remembers—you sleepy-eyed and unshaven, hair long, lit by light breaking into that space, where we tangled like sweet-sweating animals. What we didn’t know then, spring sliding home into summer, we do now, having worn these faces, lived in these skins, long enough to comprehend gravity as grace.
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Make art about a solstice memory, about the body as grace.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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