Elegy for Catherine Howard

Emma Camp

 

Catherine,

my small bird, my ocean

 

pearl, your image comes to me

only in moments of great

 

thankfulness. Only when my cup

runs over with every

 

thing you never knew: A mother

to touch your wrist, a night to sleep

 

in, a boy to look at you—

a boy who is not a man, a boy

 

who does not call you wife.

In these moments, your scissored

 

body is there. All cotton, all velvet,

all of sixteen and gone yet.

 

In your age of downfall, I

had a summer thick with promises,

 

sticky as an orange peel.

In the pink of July, my sisters

 

and I swam in an ocean too blue

for comfort—

 

the water was more intimate

than a womb. It cradled our unfettered

 

bodies, tumbling like otters in the waves.

What a gift it is to be young

 

and unburdened. To hold the wind

in your palm like a pearl.

 

Catherine,

I love you because I fear I know you—

 

in my mother, in my sister, in every

girl who has had a man turn

 

away from her

and then back again.

 

When I have a daughter,

I will tell her everything

 

and nothing. I will sit

at the foot of her bed, and pray

 

she never grows pretty enough for

silence. When I first take her

 

to the ocean, she will swim with the native

freedom of a seal.

 

I will watch her in her lightness

and imagine you, somehow

 

unbound, somehow gliding.

Blessedly oblivious to what a

 

miracle it is to be part of the salt

and the sand.