Winter/Spring 2001Volume II Issue I

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Mary Whittemore teaches creative writing at an independent school in Dayton, Ohio.  Her work has been published in several literary journals, including The English Journal and Off the Map. 

 

 

 

 

Conversation

Mary Whittemore

 

We attempt conversation as a simple means
to forge words across distance and unite two extremes.
Our bodies, too, seek balance within this sphere
discarding love's opposite: the irony of fear.
To adjust the syntax still stagnant with facts,
we change words to gestures, images to acts.
We crawl over boundaries, wreck garrisons until
in recognition of communion, we keep suddenly still.

This prayer acquires purpose, touch resumes its chorus
while unuttered memory is forming before us
a confiscated dialogue, not borrowed or scripted.
It's reassembled in newness, the heaviness-- lifted.
So what of speechless monuments cleft in two
poor homage to failure you've yet to undo
when this receding daylight instills in you
the empathetic pull of hours.

I'll hollow out those once-safe bowers
and memorize these places, this touch.
We cannot be kept as such,
but this making and unmaking, this conversation in skin
renders impassable, once we begin,
what we know of love, its work, its end,
its wholeness-- irrefragable: mythic fissures we mend.

 

© 2001 by Mary Whittemore

Also by Mary Whittemore:

First

p.s.

Earthly Love I

Earthly Love II