Monogamous, they live apart
but every day she leaves her rocky
crevice in the reef to visit him in his,
and slender as two grasping fingers
they hook on and twirl, rubbing bellies
to sweeten their bond. No fights, no mean
words, no great stirrings of the waters, just
this intimate dangle braiding together
in the privacy of a cove. The rubbing
is for the transfer of eggs from her pouch
to his belly, for like their cousin, the seahorse,
it's the male who plays mother. But why
must we read each purple notion through
the scrim of biology? Is there not more
to the everyday life of a sea creature
than eat or be eaten and the frenetic
passing of the genes? In the vast
arms of the sea, their dance takes place
in the smallest of hideaways, no one to see
or judge. Ah, the gentle intimacies
of the long-married, having memorized
each other’s bow-bend of the back, the flex
of each muscle as they twist and belly rub
to a music only they can hear. Oh husband,
honey of my hive, let us get up from this couch
where we sit each night in the dark nodding off
before the flickering screen. Have we come
this far only to settle for Netflix and another
David Attenborough’s special? Can we not
rise to the occasion, not clutch hungrily at
each other as we were wont to do years ago,
but weave about, slowly circling, bumping
belly to belly until this room disappears
into its own darkness and we become lost,
lulled in the fever, the salt and the beautiful
lie that everything goes on forever.
Alice Friman’s seventh collection is Blood Weather (LSU Press). Her last two are The View from Saturn and Vinculum, for which she won the 2012 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry. A recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and included in Best American Poetry, she has been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Gettysburg Review, Georgia Review, Plume, and many others. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia. where she was poet-in-residence at Georgia College.