This episode was originally released on July 21, 2023.

Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown. 

It seems like there's not one person who hasn't sung along with the Etta James classic, “Sunday Kind of Love”. For most, Sunday is our sacred day to lay loose-limbed in bed, to take our time to do nothing. It’s the day to roll over and let an arm and leg fall over the body of a friend, or partner, or dog, as a rectangle of sunlight slowly travels the room. Then, alas, we have arisen and stretched and yawned our way out of cuddling, towards a glass of orange juice or coffee, and it’s the day to move around in pajamas as long as possible — unhurried, reading a newspaper or, as the song suggests, relishing in the languorous joys of a permanent love. 

Today’s poem, which alludes to the biblical story of Adam and Eve and the first garden, celebrates the carnal sweetness of those chill days with a beloved. The poem brazenly proclaims the power (and maybe even recklessness) of sensuous mating that is its own form of world-building, voyage, and cultivation.

from “The Garden of Limbs”
by Cristina Pérez Díaz

1.

Limbs of each other.
Limbs to be remembered by no one.
We alone.
We grew a garden. 
Every dead Sunday we grew a garden of limbs.
Every dead Sunday a garden of daggers in our thighs.
Not to be remembered.
That every Sunday we neglected this labor.
Of founding a country.
And stayed in bed.
Each growing limbs inside the other.
And not only on Sundays.
All week long, for years.
We neglected the task repeatedly.
Even now, to be honest.
We are really just lying in bed.

2. 

But the grass will forgive us.
And the sun will forgive us.
And the cow and the horse and the seagull.
And the sea more than anything will forgive us.
In fact, they’ll be pleased.
And the multiple islands at which we didn’t arrive.
They too will forgive us.

3. 

Today dust, I myself become dust.
I do not ask, I become.
dust in love with your dust.
Yesterday I was walking carrying all the wounds.
I myself the wounded woman.
Two eyes in front of two solitary eyes.
Milk flowing from the wounds.
dust, today we shatter like dust, one body
Against the other, milk and dust
Form roses of mud.

4.

I swallow the mud and the milk and the roses.
I swallow all of this.
I love it.
All the milk rushing.
I become all the mud and the milk and the roses.
And we can enter the flesh.
Finally, without making repairs.

5. 

Massacred, it was beautiful early summer.

6.

But now it’s all forgotten.
dust.
Again, we bury the city in the past.
Again, we rub our bodies against each other.
Again, less and less is left of us.

Maybe, the skin of the roses is left.
Maybe the whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron.
Maybe our limbs.
Maybe your body is left.

Your body I will found onto the landscape.
And on the landscape a home.
And I will cut your outline and fold.
And the paper in the shape of a boat.
And I will sail you.

I promise endless expeditions.

“The Garden of Limbs” by Cristina Pérez Díaz. From FROM THE FOUNDING OF THE COUNTRY © 2022, Cristina Pérez Díaz. Used by permission of the poet.