Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
28.2
Jennifer Clarvoe
Mortal CoilI started to write a poem called "Skin," about skin--
about snakes, snakeskins out in the toolshed: shed
vellum, opalescent. I touched them. Contact, tact
and disconnection. What it means to slough
out from the inside of something that is you
until you're gone from it: how you still see
snakes when the snake is gone. One six-foot skin
stays stretched out over the cross-cut saw; nobody
hurts here; held untorn, eased out of. How
that zig-zag helped you out of something, nicked
a threshold ridge across which you held yourself
half back and heaved half forward, or inched, or hunched
or rasped, or, unbunched, shuffled off to Buffalo...
But it's not finished. The husks haunt--who goes here?
Who's gone? What's left to touch or be touched by,
touched back? And there is something contagious, yes--
is it some worry what was lost mattered more,
what stays matters less? Or else, that we most know
ourselves as creatures in that state of friction
(tangle of bed-clothes, clothes on the bed), and must
always be skin to skin in the muddle, in the middle
of rubbing ourselves out, or into kindling, some kindness,
humidity, cruelty, some kind of human mess?
