Transcript

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown.

When I was younger, I took my body for granted. I was so busy bemoaning what my body WASN’T—taller, thinner, with curlier hair and straighter teeth—that I hardly appreciated what it WAS. Looking at old photos, I can see now what I couldn’t see then.

It seems to me that middle age is the time we start to regard ourselves differently, to notice ourselves physically changing. Yes, I have new lines around my eyes and new glints of silver in my hair, but my body continues to surprise me in wonderful ways, too. It brings me a lot of pleasure—maybe even more pleasure than it did when I was in my teens, twenties, and even thirties. Because I APPRECIATE it. And because I am less self-conscious. That is one of the gifts of aging: Becoming more yourself, and caring less about what others think about you or expect from you.

My mother told me this time was coming, and she was right. I have never cared more about the things that matter. I have never cared less about the things that don’t. Clarity is a gift. Do I wish I could have that clarity AND still have my young body? You bet I do. But that’s not how this life works.

Today’s poem moved me so much because it ARRIVES at that clarity. I think you’ll want to listen to this poem more than once, letting it lap at you like water, letting it rise around you like smoke from a beach bonfire, letting it sing to you like an aria.

Bonfire Opera
by Danusha Laméris

In those days, there was a woman in our circle
who was known, not only for her beauty,
but for taking off all her clothes and singing opera.
And sure enough, as the night wore on and the stars
emerged to stare at their reflections on the sea,
and everyone had drunk a little wine,
she began to disrobe, loose her great bosom,
and the tender belly, pale in the moonlight,
the Viking hips, and to let her torn raiment
fall to the sand as we looked up from the flames.
And then a voice lifted into the dark, high and clear
as a flock of blackbirds. And everything was very still,
the way the congregation quiets when the priest
prays over the incense, and the smoke wafts 
up into the rafters. I wanted to be that free
inside the body, the doors of pleasure
opening, one after the next, an arpeggio
climbing the ladder of sky. And all the while
she was singing and wading into the water
until it rose up to her waist and then lapped
at the underside of her breasts, and the aria
drifted over us, her soprano spare and sharp
in the night air. And even though I was young,
somehow, in that moment, I heard it,
the song inside the song, and I knew then 
that this was not the hymn of promise
but the body’s bright wailing against its limits.
A bird caught in a cathedral—the way it tried
to escape by throwing itself, again and again,
against the stained glass.

"Bonfire Opera" by Danusha Lameris from BONFIRE OPERA © 2020 Danusha Lameris. Used with the permission of The University of Pittsburgh Press.