ABOUT Beth Simon

 

Beth Simon's first full-length poetry collection, Out of Nowhere, the Body's Shape, was published by Pecan Grove Press in 1996. Since then, more than 100 poems, stories, memoir, and collaborative pieces have appeared in a variety of places such as Epoch, Gettysburg Review, New Letters, Quarterly West and Southwest Review. She has a doctorate in Languages and Cultures of Asia, and is a professor of linguistics and creative writing at Indiana University Purdue University. Her scholarly work focuses on language variation, especially in Tibetan, Hindi, and American English.

How Sand Meets Water

By abandonment. Then the sky withdraws waving. Train as you like,
every long-distance swimmer gets lazy. Horizon? try infarction,
belly knot, ganglion. Believe me, there's a whole thesaurus

for denied. From sea, the bad credit friend who weeks ago
threatened now has arrived, and it is as we thought: the inevitable
black after light and not at all funny. Still, we bring forth

funeral meats, green air, salt gull, a sphere of descent like wind
on greed, a libido of will, i.e., the recursion of everything, because
my sweet, passion is a basin of misery lapped by the dog of links.
I mean, here we are, left in this mirror where each stratum

thins to a small beach shell. It's not the height from which
the body gets dropped, not hypothermia or exsanguination.
Not faith nor its mordant twin, Wait! (glam amphibian
in peridot scales)—the fact is, you can't really swim in the ocean.

Copyright © Pecan Grove Press,
1997-2003
For further information contact
H. Palmer Hall.
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November 11, 2003