What We Wear to Meet the Water
Rent from DeepDyve- What We Wear to Meet the Water
Aboard the Hudibras, 1786
I heard they threw them naked, overboard, handing down sackclothfrom the dead to the dying. I named the dead’s clothing for the spiritsthey once contained, and I knew it was true—how the body wasn’t boundby the outer surfaces of the skin but took up residence in fibers too.A life next to a life clings to a life, if only to tattle on the intricacies.
We saw she’d taken ill, wouldn’t eat or drink for days, justpray. And when we came up to the deck, she was there on all fours,her head face down on her hands, moaning a prayerful song.And I wailed a prayer too, a high-pitched holler that calledout to our sisters to circle our dying one and usher her home.
We wrapped around and around—the youngest circled next to her,the elders nearest the sea. We stood in silence until her moanssubsided, then picked up the chant when her body grew still.We sang the songs we knew to sing. We sang the songs she taught us.And those jailors let two of us stay, just that time, to witness the ripple
her slight body made, so we could tell others she was never exposed. [End Page 152]
Jacqueline Jones LaMon is the author of two collections, Last Seen, a Felix Pollak Poetry Prize selection, and Gravity, U.S.A., recipient of the Quercus Review Press Poetry Series Book Award; and the novel, In the Arms of One Who Love Me. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches at Adelphi University.
