Living in the Body

Joyce Sutphen

(1949 - )

Body is something you need in order to stay

on this planet and you only get one.

And no matter which one you get, it will not

be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful

enough, it will not be fast enough, it will

not keep on for days at a time, but will

pull you down into a sleepy swamp and

demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake.

Body is a thing you have to carry

from one day into the next. Always the

same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same

skin when you look in the mirror, and the

same creaky knee when you get up from the

floor and the same wrist under the watchband.

The changes you can make are small and

costly—better to leave it as it is.

Body is a thing that you have to leave

eventually. You know that because you have

seen others do it, others who were once like you,

living inside their pile of bones and

flesh, smiling at you, loving you,

leaning in the doorway, talking to you

for hours and then one day they

are gone. No forwarding address.

Here's a video/reading of the poem.

The author reads her poem as a reminder of how things are. Her voice is gentle but the poem could also be read as a firm talking-to that requires the reader to come to terms with certain unavoidable realities. There is a certain like it or not this-is-how-all-this-works tone.

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm in Minnesota. She earned a PhD in Renaissance drama from the University of Minnesota, and has taught British literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota. Her first collection of poems, Straight Out of View (1995), won the Barnard Women’s Poets Prize. Subsequent collections include Coming Back to the Body (2000), a Minnesota Book Award finalist, Naming the Stars (2004), winner of the Minnesota Book Award, First Words (2010), and Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems (2019). She has received a McKnight Artist Fellowship and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship and was named Minnesota’s poet laureate in 2011.