Sharks in the Rivers

by Ada Limon

I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes, I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through. It is a short walkway— into another bedroom. Consider the handle. Consider the key. I say to a friend, how scared I am of sharks.

The sun behind me is like a fire. Tiny flames in the river’s ripples. 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.

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.

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,

Bless our own kingdoms, our thrones of maps and mirrors.

no life is as long as a river.

nothing feels quite right this winter.

Everything, now, is an interrogation. Why this bird? Why this interruption, soaked to the bone? The river is still there— steady and cunning with current.

Everyday I put more sand in my mouth, and everyday I woke up with a buzzard outside my window. I have done my duty here. I have sucked my own mouth dry.

The river comes to the body bold, dreaming of black hues and a gestured cluster of colored fish. This is the way the world runs through us, its instruments of moon- water and hangnails of hope. River, river, listen, I understand the urgency. I am floodwater running; I am dirt ditch rising. A constant glutton for the outpouring pond, I am trying desperately to return to gone.

How does one lay down her rigid plans for infinity? Like a sword in the street? Take it, do with them what you will.

This is how we turn, so rotated and spun in our own isolations.

We are vine and hummingbird, eucalyptus root and centipede, junco and blue-belly lizard. (And sometimes the drowned deer, and sometimes the trapped opossum, the wayward dog, the wayward dog.)

The mountains are all gone around here, all done and gone, even the sea is trapped in a plastic bag stuck in a tree, some flawed trash-bird we have made of our own poor boredom.

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

Don’t think about Laika in orbit. Don’t think about cringe and catastrophe.

Everything is off-limits. Everything is unreal. Everything is lament and let go.

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

We are not speaking of love, I birthed myself into an animal being.

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.