Anatomy of a Dress

I declared, and immediately rejected this. For instance: 

a man I loved once liked to hurt women and would tell me

what he did to his lovers. The sight of a woman’s slight hips

as she was knocked over a television might give delight. Or the way

bones sounded in skin that bumped or scraped against a wall. 

He used to claim he could hear things like this, not

the scratch of a woman’s back on a wall, but actual

bone rubbing muscle, skin, joint, the sound 

as if sticks rattled in cloth. It frightened him, he said, he found himself

pushing other women to prove he couldn’t really hear the sound. 

And I loved him. I loved forgiving him. I must admit this

though he never laid a hand on me, 

I knew enough about this kind of loss. 

There were more significant things

to demand from the world. Such as how

a word could call up more than violence, an idea, person, become 

reality with only the finest limitations

of meaning. Such as monster, perhaps, 

or grave, or delicious. I could say, for instance, that this man

was a delicious monster with his strap-colored hair and soft mouth

though where does that place me 

in the universe of word? Perhaps you could say I 

was the monster, searching not for where rivers ran but to the source

of rivers, the frozen nugget of an idea of river: so cold 

it almost burns the rock around it. I was the one willing to sacrifice

so many others of my kind; I could listen for hours 

to his stories of women whose bones itched within them

and I all I could think was hand, eye, mouth as if to say the words

was to take his fingers in my mouth, to suck 

the warm pink nails between my teeth, or lick the egg taste

from his eye with my tongue. These were more real to me

than the fact he would cry out on the phone or in my bedroom

where we would talk. He would cry and all I could think was 

More, let my thighs be another casing for you

if this is the kind of grave you want. I almost thought grace. I almost 

gave in once, but, and this is the truth, he was afraid of me. I 

was the coldness of rivers, he said, I was the source

and when he looked down at me lying on the sheets rumpled 

like ruined skin he called me his destroyer. 

 

Perhaps the real question in the world is not 

what to love, but how to forgive. 

What does it take for the monstrous 

to be delightful in the eye of God? As if beauty itself

wasn’t also obscene — a hand really fleshed claw, a peony 

a flowering of blood. Or perhaps a word is really all it signifies, all 

we can trust in fact; to name a thing 

is to make it so. When I called this man a man, you must believe

he became one for me. The source of the river, 

not its oceangrasp. What happened to the man I loved 

is that eventually he choked a woman almost to death. 

We weren’t speaking then. Even I, it seems, have my limits. 

But I can imagine how he would have told me he could hear her spine 

crying out to him, an accusation of the flesh. What more is there 

but to love like this and be loved? he asked me once. 

You are my source of delight, 

Paisley Rekdal