Allison Adair
Poetry
Allison Adair’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Boston Review, FIELD, Ninth Letter, and Subtropics, among other journals, and will be included in this year’s Best American Poetry anthology. She was the winner of the Mid-American Review Fineline Competition, the Orlando Prize from AROHO, and the Florida Review Editors’ Award. Originally from central Pennsylvania, Allison now lives in Boston and teaches at Boston College and Grub Street.
If Imagination and Memory met unexpectedly, one last time
of one body unpiling toward another in sleep, the longing of two
waves reeling in queasy parallel. Mostly it’s like you
never rested here, this body, your head never heavy
as sorrow, as troubled bone, never turned in my palms
like an artifact, gently undisguised. I shouldn’t remember
you as the trim boat you never were, this place
as a storm. There are errands now. Children.
On the second floor of the world, a tepid bath fills.
Some people will bear any anchor through
the endless flaying tide. Our ocean unraveled quickly
into salt—but listen, for a second, as we used to
—do you hear it holding us
there, scraping against the old
undertow? Minerals under motion,
rock inside swell—no,
shell, just shell, dry-littering the wrack line.
“ I find it a strange phenomenon, the way we sometimes love people intensely and then, after a split, never see them or talk to them or even think about them. Where do those people go? I wrote this poem after dreaming about someone I'd not thought of for many years—and by then he'd become lost to me, somewhere between memory and invention. I was reading Carl Phillips's Silverchest around this time; the line 'Some people will bear any anchor' was inspired by Phillips's poem 'The Jetty.' ”