The Opposite of the Body

By Robin Ekiss b. 1969 Robin Ekiss

Of the face in general, let me say it’s a house

built by men and lived in by their dreams.

When you’ve been plucking eyes

out of the floorboards as long as I have,

you’ll see this, just as you’d see

the patience it requires

to render an eyebrown, half an hour

and an understanding of architecture.

When you see your body,

think its opposite: not the bridge,

but its lighted face reflecting the water,

some other city as seen from a ship—

your forehead, once ponderous,

now light as umbrellas—

still not beautiful enough to make time stop.

The pleasure in being a woman’s

knowing everything’s borrowed

and can’t be denied,

as when you take apart a clock,

there’s always another inside.

Source: The Mansion of Happiness (University of Georgia Press, 2009)

Biography

Robin Ekiss is the author of the poetry collection The Mansion of Happiness (2009). A resident of San Francisco, she received a 2007 Rona Jaffe Foundation Award for Emerging Women Writers and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University. Her poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, VQR, TriQuarterly, and Best New Poets 2007 from Samovar Press.

Ekiss’s poems . . .

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