Elisabeth Adwin Edwards: I See Only Your Body

when i look at the christmas tree

i see only your body

A writer is someone who plays with his mother's body in order to glorify it, to embellish it,

or, in order to dismember it.

~Roland Barthes

i want to gaze at you even though you are dead

your parched deadness still beautiful

up the narrow stairs we carried you

so light you were

propped you up in your metal bed

your trunk listing to the left

by the window you seemed to say by the window

how thirsty you drank and drank and

there you went on living a life of witness

severance

from the life you knew a green life a lush

the shock of it every limb clenched

up close each needle the shape of a tear

unrolling itself down the length of a cheek

how you slowly lowered your arms for me to dress you

blue winks of a failing light

in the tangled strands of green wires

a kind of morse between us you

drank until you stopped an invisible seal forming

over your lips

and now i can't bear to pack away your finery

in brown boxes

to wrap you in a sheet they have come

they have come they have come to haul you away

your scent still lingers in the room

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Elisabeth Adwin Edwards’s poems have appeared in Rogue Agent, SWWIM, Menacing Hedge, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The American Journal of Poetry, River Heron, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net. A former regional theater actor, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter in an apartment filled with books.