Elegy Falling Forward & Down
By Iliana Rocha
1.
In A Kiss Before Dying, Robert Wagner pushes
his girlfriend off a roof, making it look like suicide,
in order to detonate her womb’s
bomb himself. Joanne Woodward’s
character, the great disruptor by the very nature
of her womanhood & her wealth. My mother
says, Yeah, he probably got the idea to kill
Natalie Wood from this role, & she is more
than half serious. These are the kinds of conversations
we have because there is no other choice
in this violence. Splendor in the Grass
displayed the first French kiss on film, compared
sex to the stock market.
2.
Sex is like the stock market,
& the woman who enjoys sex cannot leave a movie
screen without punishment. The scene with Ginny
(named for the liquor), her neck thrown back
& out like a dog belly-up, not in the style
of pleasure but vulnerability, a crowd of men
in tuxedos waiting for their turn at parceling
her body into eighths. It is still so difficult
to know what to fear, so we fear everything
& more—the new century’s anxiety
closing in on itself, until the decades just get
better at making caution shape its body so that we
don’t recognize it as strange.
Mom asks how long I will write about this.
3.
Mom asks, How long will you write about this?
as a new Laci Peterson documentary
appears as one of my suggested titles on Hulu.
We were in a motel, getting ready
for Carrie’s wedding, & Laci was still missing,
& though memory is disciplined in what it leaves out,
I can recall the intimacy of sharing a last name:
Rocha.
That which should lull instead rings an alarm.
Lots of horses were found dead
that month in Texas, the story goes,
they followed one another into a river
& drowned. Memory’s tongue in thirsty
petals, like carnations decorating the chapel.
4.
Petals, carnations decorate the chapel
at her funeral. A funeral says so little about this world,
just undecipherable grief—dark, dark water.
Heaven bares its knuckles.
When they recovered Natalie Wood’s
body one mile from the Splendour,
she was dressed for bed. When they recovered
what was left of Laci’s torso, sea life had started
to inhabit there, putting breath back where it was,
making honorary lungs.
—So much like my rage
finding habitat in between tight columns of ribs, bone
replaced by imposter cells. My imposter blood body
falling forward & down.
5.
![Numerous lines of "falling forward & down" in vertical position.](https://s3-us-east-2.amazonaws.com/cdn-test.poetryfoundation.org/content/images/e76c852ee0a31df046aa294f3bd0786012fd64a6.jpg)
6.
Falling forward & down
because of the homemade weights he attached
to her limbs. All that time, she was keeping the San Francisco Bay in its place.
Everything in this world is theirs, except doubt.
That is solely ours.
I’m often asked why I won’t go hiking on a date,
why I think going for a swim is coercion from a polite intruder:
I’ve seen myself falling from a cliff in the bodies of other women.
I’ve seen myself struggling underwater in the sponges.
I’ve seen myself face-to-face with the bestial bluff.
I’ve seen myself the awful blue of night’s chokehold.
I’ve seen myself putting blood back into the cherries.
Theirs, ours. Theirs ours.
If there is an opportunity to destroy, it will be.
7.
Because there is too much to destroy, it will be,
& when it is happening, it has already happened.
This procession of verbs, loaded into a cannon.
Separating moments by tense makes it seem
as though they are unrelated & very far from each other.
My grandmother says she’s spent her whole life
thinking about this—how she’ll die a sad woman
but that she survived. In that we don’t ask for much,
it’s like we’re not asking at all: the smallness of ours.
Nominal ours. The rivers have been straining
long before we have, as the water I hold in my hands
breaks into black butterflies, a hope to reverse
what we can & leave the rest. In search of, an approximation:
desire of, love of.
Source: Poetry (April 2021)