Rebecca Aronson Gorge Sometimes what got the upper hand would send a body over wholesale, a ragdoll in a barrel, a dropped cannonball, but never, I think, a swan dive. Looking in at the feathery tree tops— soft with sunlight or rain above a slip of a stream pebbled with bright discs and calling all sideshows down to it— come moss come fern and burrow and jagged outreach come sharp pins of light and pillowed shadow come and be taken in— who could but lean a little forward? And what is a tide but a calling in? And the body a body, a structure building itself towards its own one end, just as it builds itself towards everything else. And what is a tide but return? Every overflow gathers what it can. Every flood sweeps at the reachable world with a quickness that could be said to be greed. It is all the body’s wanting: this world and the other and the other.

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