Today's poem is by Rachel Nelson

Our Bodies
       

The lake has not yet found a use for the bones.
It used the flimsy skin

of fish for food for other smaller fish — their tiny bright
bodies reflecting sun,         small hurried

statements about the instinct to flock. The lake used the soft
flesh sloughing from under scales

for pearly-pink flags that unfurl on windy days and pudge sweet
as a pouting child's lip

when the water is a silent mirror. That ruddy muscle hiding
in the cave of bone.

Three seasons have passed since the fish lived and its body
still lies on its side

in repose. We pull the dog away from the bleaching skeleton
but examine stages of decay

up close. We keep our bodies here too, on the shore.
The lake turns the skin

we've scraped off from blood and scab into something loveable, into
sand or plump mud piles

from which — surprise — iridescent frogs leap and — right before us — turn
into clear water. The lake

turns us into gossip called between slim shoulders of eastern pines
by neighbors, into drying prints

of deer, into collections of tiny stones and shells that shine
best when wet. Here, our minds

are ground down by windstorm, lose their sharp edges that could
easily slice the thin fabric

of a beachcomber's foot. How our red flags emerge. We merge
a little, become a kind

of together that cannot be explained, that feels as real
as the statue-smoothed curve of bone

that sinks, firm into the beach and the bright dirty waves,
under such expansive predators' wings.

Copyright © 2025 Rachel Nelson All rights reserved
from The Shore
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission