pressure
—t r a b o c c o
She stands at the edge of the Florida swamp
in jeans that make her look almost defiant,
as if she had dressed against herself.
She seems one who belongs to skirts,
to softness,
but today something in her has gone angular,
boy-bright,
pleased with its own interruption.
It is an act.
She knows it.
You could feel her knowing.
Observing.
At my keeping.
As one is, of an afternoon.
Each part known.
Each part in its place.
Oiled by water,
set by patience.
There is no feeling in it.
There never was.
She catches herself inside it,
half-laugh, half-burn,
spins once on her heel,
bends for another stone
and snaps it across the black water.
Cicadas make a cathedral of the heat.
Sometimes I think they work with me,
putting visitors at ease.
Symphony.
Breeze-bent branches.
Reeds in tussle.
The occasional splash.
My eyes raise.
A dragonfly keeps stitching blue
between sawgrass
and
her wrist.
Bright Pest.
Don't scare her away.
Bubbles.
Something moves beneath the duckweed
and disappears before becoming a name.
Above her,
aircraft trails scar pale blue,
slowly losing their edges.
Cicada echo.
Wing-flash.
Stone against water.
Then the deep masculine quiet
of the swamp receiving everything
without reply.
The water does not answer.
It never has.
It only keeps.
And somewhere behind her stands every feminine creature
who has ever mistaken becoming for betrayal:
mother, daughter, girl, animal,
a thousand summers passing their blood forward
through bodies that keep changing the rules.
For one impossible second
I almost understand her beyond instinct,
and yet,
I am made entirely of it.
What hurts is not that she is holding so much,
but that her figure has become pressure.
It moves off her in waves,
intimate without performance,
animal to the point of ache.
She carries a scent
the water knows before I do.
Warm.
A scent with pulse in it.
She is bothered in the deep way,
not by the swamp,
but by emergence itself.
How familiar.
Every creature is born twice.
Once from the shell it longs to leave.
Once from the season it can no longer hide inside.
I can sense all of this and more.
Quiet.
Slipping under.
Sun warm on my back.
Cooled by the waterline that now puddles on my spine.
Nothing is required of me.
Readiness.
That is the closest thing
I have
to joy.
And the leaves.
I love the leaves.
They come down slow,
turning,
as if they had time to decide.
They touch the water
and ask nothing of it.
A small ring.
Then rest.
Nothing else arrives that gently.
Not rain.
Not birds.
Not your kind.
Her stones come down hard.
The leaves simply arrive.
Everything that falls
reaches me
as pressure.
She is restless now.
She does not know I am here.
That does not make me less here.
The fox knew.
He always knew.
He would drink
only where the bank is too steep,
eyes on me the whole time.
Once he dropped a dead fish at the water's edge.
Backed away.
I took it.
He took the eggs.
I have not forgiven him.
I have not forgotten him either.
If I have any respect,
it is his.
This one knows nothing.
It changes nothing.
What is here is here.
This position of power is truth.
Her lack of knowing does not make it false.
It is the only moment
I have ever understood.
She is too alive for her own composure,
too aware of her own body,
and trapped and stirred by both.
And standing there,
throwing stones into the swamp,
she seems less a creature in the world
than a force trying, briefly,
to survive its own intensity.
Below her,
I wait.
Stiff.
Still.
As capacity.
As violence.
Not the kind that chooses.
The kind laid down
before choosing existed.
Old.
Ancient in the low way.
Hunger.
Stillness.
Water.
My teeth grow sore with waiting.
If I do not use them
the pressure stays in my jaw
like something unfinished.
I know this time.
I know this bank.
Pressed reeds.
Soft mud.
Duck feet.
Heron toes.
Rabbit.
Turtle.
Pig.
Blood.
Nature.
Blissful.
I brag. I know.
It has not all been magnificent.
I once lost four scales to a badger
who had apparently decided
death was preferable to manners.
I have split the same tooth twice
cracking turtle shell.
Still works.
Mostly.
Men.
They come too.
Heavy feet.
Oil.
Metal.
Dogs.
They leave marks.
They leave debris everywhere.
Your kind always does.
Sometimes they leave themselves.
Once there was old meat
up on the bank.
Vultures were deep in it.
Blue-red.
The iron stink
of crushed vertebrae.
Cloth.
I came up and pulled it in.
The vultures lifted,
complained,
went back in the trees to watch.
I did not fight.
Nothing old fights.
I took it under
and let the water make it soft.
I did not hunt it.
It was simply there.
That is not cruelty.
That is the keeping.
The cloth was a nuisance.
It left string in the meat.
The texture was unusual.
I digress.
She is still there.
My eyes sit beneath leaves.
My body balances low,
belly against the stone shelf
where the water falls away another few feet.
I have waited here so often.
For birds.
For pigs.
For things foolish enough
to drink without listening.
But never this.
She throws another stone.
I feel it before I hear it.
The water carries everything.
She carries something too.
Oh. I feel that old rise in me.
Patient.
Quiet now.
Quiet.
I smell her.
The throat pumps.
The water comes in.
I drink the air through it.
This is how I read.
Rot first.
Always rot.
Sweet and green,
the floor of everything.
Then mud,
iron-cold.
Gar,
a day dead.
Heron,
dry feather
and fish breath.
Pig, somewhere east,
musk and acorns
and a fear it does not know it has.
Oil from the road.
Tannin.
Lily.
Old shell.
Then her.
Salt.
Heat.
Skin.
Something sweet
moving underneath it.
Not blood.
Near blood.
The body preparing itself
for something I do not understand.
She shifts.
I shift.
Then stop.
There is too much happening in her.
Not beauty.
I do not know beauty.
Not the way you mean it.
Though there was Della.
Her sweet curve.
She would paint the algae
with the bend of her passing.
Grace trails in wobbly brackish film.
Oh. God.
A thing to behold.
Ha.
Della.
We had something.
Many offspring.
Several seasons.
She had dark eyes
that stayed above the water
a moment longer than necessary
when she came toward me.
I knew the weight of her
before I saw her.
The slow push of water.
The reeds opening.
Sometimes she would settle near me
without touching,
her flank warming the same mud as mine.
That was enough.
When nesting season came
she disappeared inland
and returned thinner,
scarred beneath one eye,
carrying the smell of broken shells
and small living things.
I never counted them.
Your kind counts everything.
We simply notice
when fewer return.
One season
Della did not.
For a long while afterward
I still felt the water move
the way it moved when she approached.
Nothing came.
Perhaps that is sadness.
An old body waiting
for a disturbance
the world has already decided
not to make again.
So yes.
Perhaps I know something
adjacent to beauty.
But this female above me
is not Della.
She is simply
unlike the other things.
Too much movement
inside one body.
Soft, then hard.
Still, then sharp.
Female, certainly.
But then something else
passes through her.
A roughness.
A boy-shape almost.
Gone again.
She laughs once.
Quiet.
At herself perhaps.
I do not know.
Animals do not usually confuse themselves.
They hunger.
Run.
Mate.
Hide.
Bleed.
Sleep.
Your kind carries several creatures
inside the same skin.
That has always unsettled me.
I remember something.
Not a picture.
We do not keep the past that way.
Warm mud.
Eggs.
A female dragging herself
through reeds at dusk.
Small bodies breaking shell.
Some lived.
Some did not.
That is how it has always been.
My mother knew no grief
the way yours would name it.
But something remained in the water
where she had been.
I know this.
Every creature leaves something
its young cannot understand
but still carry.
Maybe that is what generations are:
not stories,
but pressures
passed through flesh.
She throws again.
Hard.
The stone skips twice.
I could take her.
The distance is nothing.
My body knows the movement already.
Sink.
Gather.
Rise.
Close.
Turn.
The oldest sentence I know.
But I do not move.
She bends for another stone
and pauses.
Her hand rests on her knee.
Head lowered.
Something in her becomes very still.
It is not weakness.
It is not strength.
I have no word for it.
We lock eyes.
My body narrows
all its violence
into sight.
She is not scared.
She is something else.
Now, I must tell you.
There are birds we do not eat.
I do not pretend to know why.
They land close.
Move strangely.
Carry something
that interrupts the appetite.
She has that.
That inexplicable exemption.
For one moment
my hunger cannot find
where to enter her.
She is one of those.
That is what saves her.
Not mercy.
I have none.
Not admiration.
That belongs to you.
She simply stops being meat.
For a moment
she becomes something
the old machinery in me
cannot sort.
And anything I cannot place
inside hunger
I leave alone.
So I sink.
Slowly.
The leaves close above my eyes.
Her scent remains in the water.
Her stones keep falling.
And somewhere behind me
the swamp continues doing
what it did before either of us arrived:
making life,
taking life,
and never once explaining
the difference.
Joe Trabocco
Signal Literature