Corinne Dekkers

HARD | GLISTENING | OBJECT

1.

A voice returns and some might call that voice a sea.

Sea voice. The voice distinguishes from echo and distinguishes

from siren and the voice on the line moves by water.

The salt of the voice darkens and the salt of the voice

shades and the salt of the voice finds its voicing in the shallows

of an estuary grove a voice among kneeshade a call into mangrove and cedar.

The mangrove holds the estuarine surface and the surface

among kneeshade glasses glazes shows

soft nursery fin and young pole unreared.

The deer place their faces along the pane of the estuarine sea

and see their likenesses come close.

The deer see their likenesses come close and enact

the ritual of water becoming in touch

and believe water to be them

and believe water to be the other and the deer

in their approximation are right.

The glass top of the estuary falls into kneeshade

and the deer’s unison with glazing spills thinking unglazes

the top and makes molten the silver of glass. An echo

turns and the river hears the deer and the water and the alligator

hear too. The alligator spine silts and the alligator mouth yawns

a longing for water and a longing for deer and a longing for water with deer

and the alligator and the water glass darkly

the dark green of a river as one.

HARD | GLISTENING | OBJECT

5.

As a duck takes to water so you take to me. At night

you offer water carry cup to hand and offer to water

the remembering of drink. We drink, and the water enacts

a mode of remembering and the water remembers

the movement of desert.

The water remembers the movement of water, remembers

the longing of movement through sandstone and current

remembers the movement of open expanse of longing of

and of longing for the long-gone expanse of desert sea

red rock the mud fall noise of longing for longing

and longing for water and the water remembers finding it

the water long longed for suddenly along a dirt

road water seeking water and finding water water rushing

toward rushing water diving and finding solitary the sea

of sequestered sea the longing for surface the earth’s body

the sun scorch and ground the descending suddenly toward

the beloved toward the earth’s surface loving the gravity the seeping through

earth the warmth of hard earth and the warmth of heart hard to be pressed to be wet

by the current of longing stretched for longing. The water remembers the longing and

remembers

the finding and the water’s longing swells. The water warms and swells and when the water

remembers the body the water remembers the salve and there are times the water wants

to go back all at once.

HARD | GLISTENING | OBJECT

8.

To press against the surface means to press into pressure

a figure of weight that weighs in on encroaches structures into

and this might be where hardness matters.

A matter of hardness concerns the encounter of both difficult

and density: the density of challenge and the density of fiber

of object or objected. Counter the pressure or counter the venture

the complication of a gesture as a mode of applying pressure through

hardness and through density.

The hardness of a pressed book

against the booking of a play.

This play appears as a swarm of deer and the swarm of deer

are ready at the brook: they offer and they press and they

approach the water as if the throng will take them.

The water as a hardness

against which one must press.

The tension of the surface and the deer’s tongue

at the ready are varying degrees of impression.

The moment the deer lifts the pink of its mouth from the ready at the edge

of the river the river returns follows suit approaches the deer

as if the deer were the beloved the swarm long longed for long remembered.

The water remembers as all

things remember in wind.

The deer’s tongue returns to where the deer’s tongue had been

and the river returns in turn with it returns to the mouth of the deer

and remembers the longing of mothers remembers the breath of a brook

over currents racing toward the feet of a yearling and the water remembers the mouth

of the calf unreared. The water remembers and the water passes along the ridge

of the throat sequesters into the darkening glow of the interior color of deerwater

the orange ember of the inside of life and absorbs transubstantiates becomes deer

moves into deer longs for more warms as it goes and longs still for more gold

insatiable in its hard wanting.

Corinne Dekkers received her MFA from Naropa University where she was the Leslie Scalapino and Robert Creeley Awards recipient. Her writing has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Product Magazine, Eohippus Labs, Tarot Manifest, among others, and has been adapted for chapbook, symposium, ritual, and performance. In winter and summer of 2020, she was a writer-in-residence on the banks of the Pascagoula River in southern Mississippi at Twisted Run Retreat. She is a current PhD candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers, and is an associate editor of Mississippi Review.

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