This is a body in the river, touching to the air below the surface of water. This is the river’s
current hitting the limbs, turning into slow-motion acrobatics. These are stars above dancing
electrons. Arms move the swinging planets dot the measured tempo of orbits swoop the water
with arpeggios and arias and asteroids. This left arm curls from its apogee under the chest. This
chest rolls like a moon distracted by a looming nebula. These legs fold in a gesture of almost
exuberance. This hair trails in jellyfish lines, then, here, the body pivots and chases the hair like a
dashing zodiacal squid. Here, the skin is calm. Here, porous. Here the water lures the body, as if
calling it into a dance. Here, the water seeps into the cells of the body, becoming one with it.
Porous as the letter o opened into the letter u.
The body accelerates with the current working towards a crescendo. The body gains a dissonant
speed crashing against stones like cymbals. The clothing has been torn. The body is leaking. The
bones within it are steadily breaking from the various hits. The bones are becoming a dust inside.
Mixed with blood and water, the bones become an elixir, an ambrosial drink of life. The drink is a
gift to all that still wants to live in the water. The body’s blood tapers after like an effulgent scarf
reaching towards an ancestral moon. The blood tells the story of the body in the river
There is the body in the river approaching the great waterfall. As the body nears the cataract, one of
its hands brushes up against its neck and maps out the old geography of love as if it were recalling
favoured memories. The water pulls and tugs the body in a dance that grows erotic and ribald. The
body is an object and a subject. It moves with the water as if it desired this dance, desired to be
desired, rushes toward the elegy called love. The churning water has dredged up cloudy silt. The
body is not visible from one end to the next. There is a kind of ecstasy in this confusion. There is
too much to feel. Death swarms and settles like dust in a rainstorm.
There is no control. The body swings out over the cavernous gulf, and pirouettes with the falling
water’s rabid froth into the night air. Nobody on the river shores has seen the body. It would be
impossible to call it anything but a streak, a smear, a shadow of a form. To see it would be to invite a
kind of madness, to jump headlong into an abyss. We train ourselves not to see this kind of
disturbance. The body as it falls with the water becomes one with nothing. The arms spin. The
blood falls with a different gravity. The body achieves a calm poise as the world around it tumbles
up to down, blood to night. There is a body in the falling water.
There is a body in the falling water. With one last wrestle with the angels, the body sinks deep under
the wide wall of mist. The body has been beaten by its journey. It has no ears to hear. It has no eyes
to see. It has no mind to love. It cannot leave itself, cannot offer mercy or give thanks. It surfaces
downstream. It seems to invite forgiveness. With all its secrets told, petals unfolded, its forgiveness
floats away. It is an image of perfect sadness, perfect loneliness. Satiated, enough, steadfast, firm. It
is a form sliding beneath a bridge, battered in between two distant shores. It has completed its arc of
remembrance.
The Body is a poem to be published in an upcoming book by Gregory Betts.
Gregory Betts is a professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, and an award winning poet and editor with many books and chapbooks to his credit. See them on Goodreads
