Poems by Mary Bergman
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Everything Shifts Here
by Mary Bergman
Mary Bergman lives and writes 30 miles out to sea, on a crescent of sand in the Atlantic Ocean
A strange new obsession: wanting my body to feel, to look the same way it did three years ago. Three years ago I could look at this island without constantly considering its future. Two years ago, my face was already starting to line. Now the crease between my eyebrows is deeper. I worry about the island and my face in equal measure. My fingers trace the outline of my jaw, testing the tensile strength of my skin. There is no resisting any of it: the ocean, the wind, and time. We are all disappearing, all the time. Some faster than others.
Nothing else here remains the same. In fact, the thing that consumes my thoughts more than almost any other--the shoreline--the shoreline is constantly changing, shifting. It is allowed to change, expected to change. Trees lose their leaves and beach grass fades from kelly green to ochre to bleach-blonde. The seasons progress and we relish the small indicators of their shifts: the smell of woodsmoke in fall, the brilliant stillness of winter, the sound of randy peeper frogs in spring, and the thick air of summertime. Without winter, we wouldn’t have the migratory birds who stop and rest on our sandy shoals.
All this change grabs us upside down by the ankles and shakes us awake. It reminds us that we aren’t the ones in control. Somehow, this globe is still spinning, still orbiting the sun, still hurtling through space all these lightyears later. We are simply along for the ride.
Can you imagine a life where nothing shifted? There would be nothing to look forward to, nothing to endure, nothing to mourn. We’d plod on, no rise or dip in the road in sight. The neat division of the passing of the seasons throughout the year breaks up our lives into manageable chunks. They say you should write a short story in one sitting, a book in a season. (A love letter is best written in the evening, with the window open, the rumble of cars on the street mimicking the roar of the waves.)
My body is another animal. I see no beauty in my body’s changing seasons. I feel an overwhelming pull towards eroding cliffs and the houses that teeter atop them, I daydream about parabolic dunes shaped and re-shaped by the wind. My own topography is better left unmapped. The shoreline of my stomach would have to be redrawn each year. (I imagine Lilliputian surveyors and their sextants scrambling over my belly.) It ebbs in summer, the result of long days spent outside. Silver stretchmarks ripple across my breasts and thighs in a pattern echoing the tidal flats. Varicose veins and their tributaries crisscross my left leg, a choked river of blood. The thin skin of my eyelids the same translucent color as a laughing gull’s wing.
Already my body has started to age, in real, measurable ways. It is a presumptuous thing, to be worried about aging in the time of this great climate crisis. I should be so lucky to get old and dry and wrinkled as a riverbed. I see women with deeply lined faces; they carry with them decades of summers by the shore. They will be long gone before the waters rise, and they seem smug in this knowing. They eat bay scallops caught during a phytoplankton algae bloom that we are warned may cause short-term memory problems. They tell me their memories are already shot. There is still so much I need to remember.
And in an unfair set of circumstances, I never feel as beautiful as I do when I am at the shoreline. How could we not be beautiful, bathed in that pure white light, reflected by the sand and sea? Even during the shortest days of the year, I can rely on the wide expanse of beach to hold tight to the last lingering rays of sun. We will never be as beautiful as the ocean. Hers is a beauty that causes a slight physical pain, a catch in my throat, as if something inside me is slowly breaking. As if I can feel each grain of sand as it slips away, out from under me.
(A note: title of this piece is an homage to the first line of Robert A. Brooks’ 1968 poem Angle of Repose. Original line is “Everything shifts here, we agreed.”)
© Mary Bergman