Fringe Magazine - Longer Poetry Issue 15

LONGER POETRY:
Decocted Life
by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Of course he wants to know
what happened to me
because old friends always do and
he goes, what about you?
And I go, dyed my eyebrows.
And shit, there we are
because how do you explain
about bioengineering to a geek
who wears patterned underwear
and where does he get off
even asking me what’s new
anyway, since nothing is
ever new in his world,
where what happens
is like a family reunion
in some prairie state, where
everyone wears Keds
and big fat smiles
and eats corn-on-the-fucking-cob
and here he is asking me
what I’ve done lately to animate
the myth of the decocted life
and I begin to tell him
about fish and the lateral line of
sense organs they have
down each side that keeps them from—
I don’t know—
running into each other or something
and it occurs to me that I have
solved the seemingly intractable
puzzle of talking
intimately by using lateral thinking
because his questions
are only a problem when
I try to answer them
or when I even try to think
about them or about what is
the matter with my eyebrows
which are just getting older
like the rest of me and
that part of my story isn’t a lie
but maybe I fudge some
important facts about
childhood, to get them right
at long last since
I couldn’t accomplish it
at the time, although
there were Angel Fish
and Sergeant Majors
in the woundingly azure surf
and none of them swam into one another
so the acute sensitivities
in the rows of nerves along their sides
must have done their job well
while I was deciding
that whatever happened when
I tipped over the high chair
was worth it
if I didn’t have to
eat those eggs
and outside tropical fish
schooled around in
a varicolored Busby Berkeley
synchronized swim routine,
an implausible pinwheel, psychedelic
but not mind-altering enough
to erase years’ worth of memories,
although something did,
and that makes me ask him,
what does he mean,
what about me
and can he explain that
and also illuminate
the reasons for pastel hotels,
tile floors, motor scooters,
water’s constant motion,
and the small frivolities
of holiday cottages, and
can he sort out how
my secret face
was the price I paid
to get that one night on the cliffs
with the wind off the ocean
like a salty scarf, the surf
blasting the beach
thirty feet down, while inside
the house next door, my parents
danced a soignée fox trot,
post-war chic on a limestone
island 30% the size of D.C.,
shared with a few tourists, the help,
some friends in evening clothes,
and a community
of Portuguese farmers, none of whom
knew I had escaped
and headed out
to the yard gym to swing
and listen for the ocean chorus:
the cardinal, clown, lion, parrot,
puffer, trigger, trumpet,
grouper, hamlet, rockfish,
snapper and the red hind, all of them
singing, singing
as under my perfect dark eyebrows
I flew out across the lawn.

End