For What Binds Us
Jane Hirshfield
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
It is our scars that make us who we are. I wore my scars like trophies when I was a child. Although I don't look at my scars quite the same as I did when I as seven, when scars were proof I was tough, I still like my scars. They are reminders that my flesh has engaged the world and won, and lost, also.
My c-section scar is a shiny and thin smile. The mottled scar under my chin reminds me of the days when I believed I could fly and pushed an iron swing set too far. The scar that runs the length of my pinkie finger is still tight, it will be a year still before it softens it military stance. There are other scars, psychic as well as physical, too many to document, but it is the jagged scar below my knee which remains a lone sentinel to the end of childhood, made when nail tore flesh.
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