Human Geography

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY / Mark Jarman Sometimes I feel the whole coast in my body. When homesick, this helps me sleep at night. Sand lies along my arm. Along it Lies the buter pressure of all otherness, The twinning, twining ocean, gray or blue As the sky, green or black as shallows and depths. The neighborhoods salted by its break, the roads Peppered with sand, the riptides crushing shells, Tangle together, like limbs and water. But to be honest, this wholeness is just a segment. At most a draft sets off an instinct. Skin prickling, eye flickering, a taste of brine, And I feel the summer heat of a sidewalk That dips and rises with the coastal hills Where wild oat, chaparral, and live oak now Are stucco houses scraping the fog's body, That vapor that burns to vapor by afternoon. The heat comes up, the hills rise and descend. A friend winces that a sliver of bottle glass Has pierced his heel, grinding to be dislodged. He sits down on a lawn, just like a tailor, Pinching the heel that pouts a bead of blood, And I go up to someone's door for a needle. She stares out of a huge brightness, On such a hot day, a blaze inside her house, Lamps and glaring reflectors leaning toward Something stretched behind her. The needle Itself feels like a burning splinter of glass, And when I turn away, the day seems dark, Darker as her door clicks and she calls, "Keep it," About the needle. Out, the bit of glass Is invisible. Invisible, the sequence, too, My age, my friend's identity, the woman. Here's when the stucco town grates like a shell, Abrades, abrades, to powder vague as fog, And turns so smooth, the flanges, hinges, Ridges, spurs, and spicules, sanded off, Hushing itself to sleep without a name, Softening, sieving fact and leaving fiction. 40 · The Missouri Review And that is when I nearly fall asleep. But this can happen any time. Awake, I drive every road at once, wired with passion, For it's always a surprise. I can never think, "Now I will feel the town where I grew up And brand it to my body here, so far away." A gift, the feeling that flesh itself is a place And not, banal reliance, just the body Working today as always—but another thing. Then, I can drive back into a story, And I choose, and pick it out again. My friend squeezes his heel in his hands, A short, compact, fierce boy in pain. I don't want to bother anyone, but he Orders me up to the house's front door To beg a needle. No, it doesn't need fire. The glass is just below the heel's callous. We're 12 years old this summer. Down at the beach, The offshore winds of afternoon have raised Those rare, scooped-out, quick, and light Waves for body surfing that we like. I go up to the door, knock, it's jerked open, And the body in it's just a silhouette In light and heat, a sun spot on the sun. Crisp, cut-out, black distinctions then appear: Her curls of hair, knots of bathing suit, Then pale, flesh crescents along cloth lines, Thigh and breast. Her voice, a kind of blade, Cuts between us swiftly with its question. She disappears and I can't help but see it, What the lamps and reflectors and the camera Point at, stretched out like a bed or a body: Just a miniature city, just a model, Nothing, no one else. She puts the needle in my palm And says, "I'm an architectural photographer." And so, I tell my friend, as he tries The feel of his foot, relieved and easy, Long past the house and nearly to the beach, That in that house, hidden under the lights, I've seen what neither of us has ever seen, Even at the beach where flesh is sand— Everywhere exposed, and yet, and yet— I've seen her and the camera set to take her. And this little story grows, for he at once Mark Jarman...