I have been tied to water for as long as I can remember. Perhaps it was being born a Pisces, or in San Diego, or the daughter of a Navy man, or maybe it’s more than that. Water is the natural element that inspires me, whether it be the ocean, or rain, or even sweat. I find these themes in my own writing, and I find myself drawn to them in other people’s writing. And so it is with this poem. Sandra Alcosser is the co-director of the MFA program I attended. My first semester, when most of the other brand-spanking-new MFA students were taking her poetry workshop, I found myself in the workshop of the much more formidable formalist Glover Davis. I sometimes wonder how my writing would be different if it had been the other way around. I don’t regret it, as Glover Davis was an excellent teacher and mentor, and later my thesis advisor. He was blunt and honest, always. However, Sandra Alcosser’s style and subject matter are much closer to my own, and that makes me curious. That said, this is one of hers that I love:
Sweat
Friday night I entered a dark corridor
rode to the upper floors with men who filled
the stainless elevator with their smell.
Did you ever make a crystal garden, pour salt
into water, keep pouring until nothing more dissolved?
A landscape will bloom in that saturation.
My daddy’s body shop floats to the surface
like a submarine. Men with nibblers and tin snips
buffing skins, sanding curves under clamp lights.
I grew up curled in the window of a 300 SL
Gullwing, while men glided on their backs
through oily rainbows below me.
They torqued lugnuts, flipped fag ends
into gravel. Our torch song
had one refrain–oh the pain of loving you.
Friday nights they’d line the shop sink, naked
to the waist, scour down with Ajax, spray water
across their necks and up into their armpits.
Babies have been conceived on sweat alone–
the buttery scent of a woman’s breast,
the cumin of a man. From the briny odor
of black lunch boxes–cold cuts, pickles,
waxed paper–my girl flesh grows.
From the raunchy fume of strangers.