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ROCK, WATER, IRON, FLESH

REUNION

Yesterday, my sister, her voice crackling across
2000 miles, phoned to say the counselors
of our old summer camp have invited us to
a reunion tea. Frosty, she told me,
will be there. Huck and Nan.
Also Sparky, Jo, and C.G. Math may not be
my strong suit, but even I can compute
the counselors we last saw 40 years ago
are filing Medicare forms, collecting
Social Security. These women who loved
other women passionately and young girls
with chaste restraint, discarding guitars,
Levis worn beltless on their hips, and Pendletons
with Camels in their pockets, will be
crooking handbags and patting wiry curls.

Is Marge coming? I asked and what would we
all discuss as we crumbled macaroons?
Our husbands, their partners? Our children,
their pets? Our Milosz, their Kahlil Gibran?
Even as my sister and I jammed the line
with jests, I felt shamed and ashamed by
my condescension. So I said I was cooking supper
and hung up. Then, chopping leeks, I wept
knowing I'd loved these women because they
gazed past 12, past 14, past 16.
Yet, still, I can't forgive them for striding
from old photos to reandrogynize me, so I rang
my sister back and said I couldn't afford to come.

TWELVE:
ROUGH AND UNSUGARED

River time was the only time
as we relished what was stolen, what was
borrowed and the pleasure in each.
Past sandbanks on the Flambeau,
adrenaline high, we whitewatered
in canvas canoes, buoyed by
the weightlessness of youth where
risks were taken, not subjects to
debate. At night, the campfire flared

and, with our counselor, we bellied
between furrows, stole armfuls
of corn to roast for supper.
But we'd forgotten to portage salt,
so we scrubbed faces, tucked shirttails,
hiked to the farmhouse by the field
where we — well-mannered thieves —
asked to borrow, even dug in pockets
and offered to pay.

Later, squatting by flames to fend off
mosquito and bear, we roasted our booty,
lavished charred grains with pinches
of salt, knowing it was horse-corn —
feed for stock, rough and unsugared.
But we filled our stomachs,
picked our teeth, smelled wet cobs,
our gamy, high-breasted bodies dimly
aware, as we listened to fugue of

guitar and wave, how the river
had spun us free and what was stolen had
sweetness too complex for the tongue.

THIRTEEN:
THE IRON HANDLE OF INNISFREE

Innisfree: not the bee-wattled glade of Yeats
but Wisconsin by fast-moving water.
Our tents were up. Dinner was squaw-corn
and Ritz apple pie from the campfire oven.
And that night, before the bear came,
my counselor — careful not to touch her body
to mine — leaned toward me under inked pines
and kissed me full on the lips.

Later, after the bear, after morning coffee
with eggshells, we swam the white river across
from Innisfree; and as we — naiads on boulders
ringed by water — lounged, I found the handle,
a heavy iron oval its shaft sunk deep into rock.
Open sesame, I told myself. With a twist,

hidden places might be revealed. As my counselor
eyed me in my two-piece cotton suit,
I took hold of the handle and slipped into the river,
held fast and twisting, tethered yet free.
Then, without looking back, I uncurled my fingers
and let the current fly me downstream
away from rock, iron, flesh: elements that
beggared revelation.

FOURTEEN:
BEDTIME STORY

My last year as a camper, last trip on the Flowage.
After weeks of rain, mosquitoes smudging
the air in pewter clouds, we fled to our tents
at night. Terrible end to a terrible day:
we'd dinged a canoe, forgotten coffee, and
my cabinmates were furious I'd been chosen.
Next summer, I'd be staff —
a JC — while they, again, were campers,

so they made me tent with our counselor Marge,
said I was in love with her.
To escape girls and mosquitoes, Marge and I
zippered in. It was hot, and sunset,
through netting, a crosshatch of amber
as we stripped to underwear, lay on sleeping bags,
and gazed out. Then Marge, cameo Marge
with the gray-marble eyes, said she'd rub

my back, began to knead muscles whispering,
Splenius, deltoid, trapezius, exterior oblique,
gluteus ... Each Latin word offered
in flat Wisconsin tones, each touch tender
yet non-invasive. Lying there, I drifted,
watched the sky now amethyst bleeding onyx,
trying to slough the day, unwilling to admit
a woman was making love to my back.

FIFTEEN:
RUNNING GOOSE-EYE

Goose-Eye the unrunnable rapid. I faced it
three times in one day. Though canoes
were to be on lead lines while
we waded the shallow chute near shore,
water was raging over our heads
and Jen, my co-counselor, spiking a fever,
was incoherent. So I asked the girls to
bushwhack the woods to the low eddies.
Then with my cousin as bow
and Jen athwart as dead weight, I knifed
canoes one by one through Goose-Eye.

Wet and crazed, sweeping by rocks and holes,
buoyed by shouts from the girls below,
I claimed the river. Downstream —
a road and a phone and I called camp, said
we'd run Goose-Eye three times, said Jen
was sick and we needed a blue-truck pick-up.
Marge came, yet when I climbed in
next to her and reached out,
she pulled away, frowned as if I'd grown
too old and too bold. But campers
lined the road as we rattled in,

cheering, calling my name. Alive then,
drenched with pleasure, I thought risk-taking
made me immortal. Was this ardor tamped
by conscience? I'd like to say yes,
but it wasn't. Even today, it shivers me
to recall how I rose three times up from
the whitewater of the Chippewa and flew.

SIXTEEN:
TOLLING THE BELL

Midnight: straddling the roof under a half-moon,
we pulled the rope and rang each time a car
peeled in. The campers and their trunks of
sooty clothes were gone. Now Marge, Jen,
and the others straggled back as we —
JCs too young for bars in town — were
gabled there, drinking pop, watching them.

P.E. teachers in their 20s, they weren't like us,
though we'd frayed jeans and spit-combed
ducktails like theirs. Especially Marge's.
We envied her blondness, real we knew,
since communal showers showed pubic hair
gold as curls on her head. She said she'd never
marry or have kids, though her mother
held out hope. Marge — my sister learned
at the reunion — had breast cancer, died at 33.

Marge's breasts: dark-nippled globes
with blue veins that pitched when she bent
to razor hair on her legs. But that August night,
Marge and Jen climbed from a Chevvy coupe
and linked arms, their moon-shadows
stilting into pine-needled dark. Wistful,
I thought of Goose-Eye, Innisfree,
of stealing corn, sharing tents. Then I
tolled the bell again for friends on the way to
becoming strangers, women whose lives had,
for a while, grafted a subtle rhythm onto mine.

© All Copyright, Susan Terris.
Rock, Water, Iron, Flesh
(Missouri Review, Larry Levis Poetry Competition, 1998 - Finalist)
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.