Mara Adler

A woman lounges on a summer beach

wearing but few scraps of fabric, a few lines, 

and with much of her bare, blank before the sun, 

she believes the world is more transparent 

and porous than it is. She is, of course, 

perilously beautiful, feigns obliviousness

of the man nearby. Choosing not

to enter the sea, but looking out onto it, 

she feels that attendant terror forgotten 

since graduating from the word “impossible.”

It is like running a finger over glass, 

noting the embedded pockets of air,

fissures. She remembers the exhibit 

from last spring, the lady-painter who, traveling

across vast climates and altitudes,  painted

repeatedly, the same landscape, which was in fact 

not a landscape. Rather, it wasn’t a landscape 

	one experiences in the world, with one’s eyes. 

They were scenes of a glass-like vacancy 

	one might return to in dying or in rapture. 

The vacancy is rendered by way of 

	a variational matrix of white and black

brushstrokes occasionally gathering 

	into figural masses, the matrix 

forms a dense veil over once naturalistic

	scenes of the lands she visited. Their canceled tones

peer through the grid. Ochres of Burma. Phthalos of 

	Athens at night. It is a feat to remember

the separateness of things, that even in 

	seemingly unified spaces, beaches

and the like, and despite one's fevered pleading

for “otherwise,” much of life is a struggle 

between opposites. A woman lounges

 on a summer beach. All the sands around her at once 

appear flimsy metaphors for the mind.

They barely stand, collapse at her breathing.

All the sands around her, grit, grinding, the soft grit 

of space. The man, who was until now attending 

her image, approaches the woman, herself far 

in thought, near sleep. She finds herself suddenly 

attentive and anticipating, how she feels 

in dreams and theaters. It passes between them then.

And how the sands shift beneath the body,

in the slight uprighting of her 

to better hear him, his way of smiling suggests

a wish to speak with her, for her to speak in turn.