Beyond Us
March 10, 2022
That Our Affections Carry Themselves
Beyond Us
by Brandon Lewis
How much longer can this girl run naked
along the shore?
It’s my turn to leave her,
ride the red kayak out until she is a microscopic dash below
my wife’s loose hair.
Our affections carry themselves out.
Some anniversaries are like that, the lake’s face calm – guarding
one other’s solitude where once
we had sex right there in the street, our hearts meshed
and our coats left the pavement warm.
This water, once a mile-high milky
glacier
above elk and men hunting elk it want wants now
to carry me out. It wants to carry me as I want to be carried
where the voices
from each end of the bay drift and dissolve.
Take unto yourself the wild
thyrsus
now behold, now yourself behold holy now
all the land yourself and all the land shall dance now.
I want to tell her
let’s not return to that hunching over desks, over anything but
each other’s bodies.
It’s all right if our affections carry themselves out
as the wrecks in the lake,
preserved as they could never be in salt, sealed in pulsing
underwater light. If
our affections, like Captain Cook but less ugly, cannot swim amid the fire
and dragonflies.
Our affections carry themselves out and we let them and let them
in place of blood.