Poetry
Coming Apart Together

Mary Bradford
Volume 23, No. 4

We exchange in great detail the weather report. 
We describe our coming decay and dissolution. 
Your sight has considerably worsened in one eye; 
Your dentist is into your mouth for five hundred; 
Your little finger reacts unfavorably to the cold, 
and a close friend only four years older died. 

I allow as how I'm hiding out from my gynecologist 
since he removed certain valuable organs. 
My neuritis is still making a grand tour of my body. 
My skin, it seems, is deteriorating, my hair congealing, 
and a childhood sweetheart died only last month. 

And yet, we fall upon each other 
in springtime lust just as if we still had 
all our teeth, hair, eyesight, and internal organs, 
just as if we ourselves had invented 
the weather, our bodies, and love itself. 

First published in Exponent II, Vol. 9, No. I (Fall 1982), p. 13. 
Reprinted in Harvest: Contempory Mormon Poems, 1989, p.62, 
edited by Eugene England and Dennis Clark. .  

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