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In the summer
at day’s end
we notice our salted skin
(how it clings and crusts as silt deposits)
touch lightly the tomato-red sheen in that space just below the eyes,
at cheek’s peak
deep lines of chocolate brown beneath fingernails
and plastered into the creases of our necks
Wearied bodies. Sticking
flesh. Warmed and weighted
eyes. The smell of ourselves.
We are caked and moistened from the soil that draws up seeds to plants
and the damp places that quench them lavishly.
The water runs murkily off us and we watch its browness against the
porcelain sink.
Who was it that likened sin to dirt?
Who declared purity a vast white void?
Who never noticed the gospel of a body
in the summer
at day’s end?
-Joy
