CNF: I am here to lay my body down
by Carolyn Zaikowski
my rugs and tiles, I love them. yes, this is the correct word, love. my sinks, chairs, forks, these fronds on my ferns, and all my deep purple hearts. my primrose as well. and the atlases, those ancient ones I carried with me, with all their keys in code. and the mishappen stones, hoarded strings, dull tacks. for forty or a hundred days, or ‘til all that remains:
I am here to lay my body down;
yes, this vow is correct. for I left everything for here. left his home and his, too. was caught in phonebooths downtown and in fields stuffed with what were called, by trusted sources, wild things. I was brashly scissor-cut from the elegies and odes of my mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers all the way back. which wasn’t far, to be fair. and from rooms crushed by walls toppled by the unpacked crates of others. barred from the only room I had a key to, driven from the bed I’d, as in a dare, named mine. and so I lay my body down:
my paper stacks and dishes, my sprays. my notebooks and jumpers. lights and switches. all the shoes on my feet imprinting floors just because they can. crusty chairs, the links on my chains,
I love them, yes—this is the correct word, love, my love.
forty or a hundred days for my body forty or a hundred days for my bruise—
all the way back, foreseeing my autumn fern and its fronds, I someway waited. predicted my fern’s primordial lace, the glories of its slits and arrowy points. patient. maybe not serene, but patient. the man who never arrives will tell you: I’ve always been so patient. studying with a hustle and hope only to be attained with the glasses I was born with, and my abacus, my astrolabe, my camera obscura. all these trances I loved within, stubborn, years before I could aspire to meet lace, let alone the lace of a fern.
there’s no tracing or touching me now, here at this arrival. I am here to lay my body down.
forty or a hundred days.
forty or a hundred days for my body forty or a hundred days for my home.
Carolyn Zaikowski is the Poet Laureate of Easthampton, MA and the author of the novel In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared widely, in such publications as The Washington Post, Alaska Quarterly Review, Everyday Feminism, DIAGRAM, West Branch, and Denver Quarterly. Carolyn holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University and currently works as a creative writing instructor and volunteer death doula. She can be found at www.carolynzaikowski.com and carolynzzz.substack.com.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “I am here to lay my body down”? This is part of a poetry manuscript I began writing, largely by accident, during the early months of the pandemic, where I was living alone in a post-divorce apartment. The spiritual significance of “forty days” to me was dancing with the etymological significance of the word “quarantine”, which originally meant “space of forty days” for ships to isolate after their journeys during the plague. There was a lot of contemplation and emotion happening around the theme of physical space, objects, and inside-ness, and the fraught history of homes and safety going back to my childhood. The symbolism of the journey, the waiting, of arriving at last, having earned a home that was mine, that I could be the priestess of, a home I had finally earned that no one could touch, control, make unsafe, or tell me what to do (or not do) within. It was the first time in my life I’d had that, despite imagining its possibility as a child, where I waited in a hell-home. Writing this piece, I was so aware that despite my severe depression and the depths of horror that were happening in the world, I finally had a home and, goddamnit, it was mine. A humble little priestess-dom within which I would lay my body down, and which I would lay my body down for, stubbornly, if ever I had to fight for home again.
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