Why We Need to Be Together
By Christina Hutchins
We lean over the end of a dock in Wisconsin
looking down forgetting how reflections
distort because beauty is in the distortion :
red carried on ripple halves between blue
sky your sweater broken and disturbed lifting
over your head and reaching under the dock
slapping the pilings red red red
except you may not even own a red sweater
we have never stood on a dock together
though I do have a poem your self portrait
beside a boathouse : "She came to herself,
for herself" and me wanting her wanting you
and of course these fish spinning though our bodies
that are only surfaces after all
until as we have done and will do again we turn
to each other warm and grasp with our arms
a pleasure so dense the hollow crafts of poems
all our language tossed and landed even water-
-striding images streaming out and under can convey
only scant pieces cannot be sufficient as when
we take each other and hold on