"Salt Water"
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Peter Campion read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
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The scalloped cliffs of Matsushima shine
in this hotel in reproduction silk-screen.
Sliced by the long horizon past Sendai
the sky and ocean mirror, spiraled by breakers.
The way apart from you I picture you:
conjuring moistened lips
…….......................……......you gently pinch
then thinking
………….....…...what would it be like to live
inside you, be you: sway of your swift walk
and thrown-back hair, your stuck then wending speech.
And no: it all grows nebulous, like gauze.
Aerial shot … night highways wiring
the littoral.
…………........That scintillant dark is all:
that space between us:
…………..……….............…...constant, animate
crackle of water draining off the sand.
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Peter Campion is the author of two collections of poems, Other People (2005) and The Lions (2009) both from the University of Chicago Press. He teaches in the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Minnesota.
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