Sharks in the Rivers

by Ada Limon

We’ll say unbelievable things to each other in the early morning—

I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes, I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.

Sharks bite fewer people each year than New Yorkers do, according to Health Department records.

I say something to God, but he’s not a living thing, so I say it to the river, I say, I want to walk through this doorway but without all those ghosts on the edge, I want them to stay here. I want them to go on without me. I want them to burn in the water.

The pulled-apart world scatters its bad news like a brush fire, the ink bleeds out the day’s undoing and here we are again: alive.

What’s left of the woods is closing in. Don’t run. Open your mouth big to the rising and hope to your god your good heart knows how to swim.

When did the world begin to push us so quickly?

She cannot decide what she desires, but today it is enough that she desires and desires. That she is a body in the world, wanting, the wind itself becoming her own wild whisper.

The river is still there— steady and cunning with current. It does not answer, but it loves the conversation; it is both the cat and the bird. It is at once your body dissolved in this rain and your beautiful wet hands trying to hold onto water.

Don’t you know those birds are going to toss themselves to the streets for some minor song of happiness? And who can blame them? This life is hard.

And let me be the first to admit, when I come across some jewel of pleasure, I too want to squeeze that thing until even its seedy heart evaporates like ethanol, want to throw my bird-bones into the brush-fire until, half-blind, all I can hear is the sound of wings in the relentlessly delighted air.

and dearest, can you tell, I am trying to love you less.

Say something pretty about it. I dare you. Something pretty. (Break it.) Something pretty. (Kill it.) Beauty will come to you, lay down at your feet, put its wild hair in your lap. Will you know it,

I remember thinking this was what life was, and what I had always wanted: being pressed on a warm, flat rock, our wet imprint there as if it would matter, I am holding on. I am holding on.

Who knew it would be hard to live to thirty-two? A friend says the best way to love the world is to think of leaving.

Stop blaming the heat, the weather is not a response to your desire, or non-desire,

This is how your life will go, you know that. Day after day. Awful acceptance: the soft life of your footprints.

You miss everyone. Even the people you read about today you didn’t know, their faces on the brain as if on paper.

you think, things aren’t so bad. You say you love the world, so love the world. Maybe you don’t even say it for yourself, maybe you move your mouth like everyone moves their mouth. Maybe your mouth is the same mouth as everyone’s, all trying to say the same thing.

My mother’s psychic says, everyone essentially wants the same thing as everyone else, a sense of belonging, a coming home.

The very first time I really loved sex was the very first time I was happy to be a girl.

What we define as human tenderness troubles each of us differently.

To lay one’s hand in another’s without fear is a seemingly simple act.

I must know that I have not dreamt you, that most stories are at least half true.

I say to a stranger, I am harmless. But the word doesn’t seem right. I have been harmed, but I do not wish to do harm, but I could do harm. (I am not without desire.)

All of these failed bargains, but god can’t we agree to this— dark comes so slowly, teeth in the hair, lips in the ears. What good words will do to a mouth, yes.

World, turn all you want to, faster even. I’ve come to like the way the breeze feels as it rips me limb from limb.