Quiver of Offness
by Michelle McMillan-Holifield
Golden Shovel poem from first stanza of Anne Sexton鈥檚 鈥淭he Truth the Dead Know鈥
Stubbled cliffs make industry of my body. The stars are gone.
The fishermen who find me will say
I leapt. Will say I lit the sky like a meteor. Will say
the sea was rouged with my constellation. And
they will be right. And wrong. No one sets out on a walk
this time of year unless they are a nameless branch of cold. From
the cliff鈥檚 edge, I watch the water sharpen rocks as into steeples of a church,
and the mood within those gaps is autopsy-chilled, refusing
even one moment of respite. My last thoughts are like the stiff
groaning of winter and its slow procession.
My body plummets to the grave.
If I had jumped, my fingers would have no problem letting
go scant branches of rock jutting over the dead
earth-shoulder. I do not vault over the side on my own. I am on a ride
I cannot exit: a quiver of offness from the earth, as I stand, not alone in the
world but apart from it. Once my spirit leaves the oven of its hearse
and my body is raked from the sea, it is finally still. It no longer grieves itself;
it is
free to molder under winter wreaths, beneath creeping phlox in June.
Freed from the fray of its drab wool. I was once a cave. I am
now, and this has become ok with me, tired of being brave.
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