Denotation

They told me,

"Not one word

over what is,"

and all song 

ceased. I could not

write my name.

They told me

it was simpler

and proffered unity

and proffered relief.                                                       

I saw a boat.

I wrote boat.

I did not think

coat, stoat, smote,

sail, ocean, salt air,

lost.

I saw a boat.

I could not write

swan. But I dreamed of you

in ink, your skin's incongruous

benediction of skin and thing

at once:

sun, leaf, anchor,

rabbit, circle, knife.

I begged you to cut

away my eyes,

but it was forbidden

as dreams would be.

Every body was body. "The rain

is someone crying," someone said,

and they killed him.

In my last dream

you held your palms to the glass

and gave me two closed eyes,

then closed your fingers

over the last possible thing.

Rachel Bennett was born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1979, and moved to New York City in 2001, after participating in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Irish Writing Program in Dublin, working in a nursing home in Ecuador, and earning a B.A. in English from Grinnell College. Her poems have won two Whitcomb Prizes judged by Gerald Stern and James Galvin, respectively, and appeared in Buffalo Carp, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, Rhapsoidia, elimae, Alba, The Big Toe Review, zafusy, Adagio Quarterly Review, and Laika Poetry Review; two poems included in Rhapsoidia were 2006 Pushcart Prize nominees. In July 2007, Miss Bennett was invited back to Dublin to give a reading and talk to current students in the Irish Writing Program. She currently lives in Brooklyn, develops programs for the Medicare Rights Center, and teaches poetry in New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.