Translations of Grief by Kathryn Bevis

Denial

We meet each week. I tell her who I am

today: how, in disbelief, I am a nursery

of sardines. Go on, she says, and I speak

of our flicking, cross-hatched skins, our silver,

shoaling bodies, the swallowtail of our fins.

I explain our obedience to the pull

of colder currents, how we dine on blooms

of plankton, how oblivious we are as dolphins

wait to herd us toward a surface snatch,

as gannets mass to fire themselves — gold

hooded — a thousand arrows to the sea.

Anger

Next time, I’m fury sitting there. Zipped

in a zebra suit, my nostrils flare. One word

from her and my body is a bucking bronco

that never wants to stop. I’m fabulous,

of course — a fashion model with a perfect

arse — dressed to kill in symmetrically

shredded tights. I launch the designer

handbag of myself, thrash my tail and mane.

I hoof the box of tissues, boot old Freud

and Jung and Klein onto the floor. My kick,

we find, is fierce: too much for me to bear.

Bargaining

Friday, midday again, and I’m here

on the dot as a lyrebird on her chair.

I shrill, she nods in time to the rhythm

of my tiny, clockwork heart. I’m haggling

today with chirrups, whistles: What if?,

If only..., Why? Rehearsed on the forest’s

velvet-curtained stage, I negotiate

with all I’ve got these days: the tune

of chainsaws, the song of car alarms,

the camera shutters I must mime. I open

my throat, descant my own demise.

Depression

At last, one day, I come as myself.

The quiet holds us both. I try

to tell about the blue whale I’m trapped

inside. There’s so much we don’t yet know

about blue whales: how many they are,

and where they go to breed. But she knows

as well as me that a blue whale’s heart

is the size of a Ford Fiesta: each chamber wide

enough for a drowning woman to pummel

herself against, each beat a boom against

her bones, a deep-sea detonation.

Acceptance

The months strobe by. I shapeshift again,

again, begin to believe

in the transubstantiation of the flesh.

I am a deep-sea jellyfish, pulsing

disco lights of green and yellow, red. I am

a black-capped squirrel monkey leaning

on a ledge, an elephant doggy paddling

in the rain. I feel my fins grow in. I know

this darting synchrony: I am sardines again.

I am the white ibis who stands one-legged on a rock.

To the sound of distant thunder, I am

the bushbuck — alive, alive and licking salt.