Susan Rich

ODE TO THE BODY

While asleep my body still
grows eyelashes, threads air from
heart to lungs, replenishes stars.

The seagrass extends its roots,
will be photographed from space.
While asleep, the cat interrupts

the silence; his twenty toenails
keep growing. When my body
decides to create an embolism

the size of a brigantine
in a bottle, my blood works
overtime through the swells

of ventricles, the rigging of chest
and hips. I sip a double cocktail,
then rest a hand on Watson’s

wave-shaped ears. He floats in
the scent of face cream, licks
my eyelids and nostrils clean.

While asleep I dream of water,
crab pots and the red sting of jellyfish.
If a jellyfish attached inside my chest

that’s how this strange breath feels—
the heft of everything known.
While asleep this body decides

with a hundred indecisions what it
will do next ---- a lighthouse island
in Finland, a Barbados holiday?

What will the body decide?
Bubbles served with everything
or a chorus of new shoes?

What’s next, the body asks—
yet what can I offer her except
oceanic waters: a living, breathing blue—