After Reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road
Anna Reeve
That evening, I read The Road long into the night.
One man’s vision of love shredding in the vacuum
of space, vanishing among earth’s aeons. Her gods
desiccated, the last expiration of a naked moon.
I slept, then rose to bring my daughter to my bed
and love swam silky in the glass with emptiness like
drops of dye in water. The question is entire— it is
plump, seamless, and hard, like a marble.
It repels our tools, so we adopt it as our life’s work— or
abandon it in disgust, and think about it during sex. We
know millennia grow us long and leggy to mow us
down. We read study abstracts and the conclusions of
trials. Our answer is to touch the skin of our lovers and
as we lie down in batches, daughters rise up.
I wondered how to tell my daughter, when the time
came, that love is last, and after love, no word.
I wondered what to say to her, when, at the age of
5, she wept hard when she finally understood that
I would die. A profound grief—a fine soup in a
dead leaf, or a dead thing in a living hand.
Anna Laura Reeve is a poet living, gardening, and getting into tarot near the Tennessee Overhill region, historic land of the Eastern Cherokee. Previous work of hers has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Rust + Moth, Terrain.org, Fourteen Hills, and others. She is a semifinalist for the Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize, a finalist for the Broad River Review’s Ron Rash Award, and her first poetry collection, Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility, is coming in 2023 from Belle Point Press. Read more: www.annalaurareeve.com.