Written while living in The Alamo Apartments on Normal Street in Kirksville MO. 1997

The naked girl used to live in the apartment I live in now. I don’t know her name. I do know that she was tall, with dark stringy hair and dark eyes. She seemed bony to me, all knees, elbows, and shoulders. She used to read her poems at a local restaurant on evenings when that sort of thing was done. Every last poem she wrote involved a joy in shedding things. They would start,

“I was on my bed…”
“I was naked in the woods…”
“I was rolling in the grass…”
“I was tangled in the covers…”

My landlady said (as I stared at the wood floors and big windows thinking, “How do I haggle, what is the value of this space?”), “The girl who used to live here was an artist. Maybe you knew her.” She pointed to an alcove above the stairs, “That’s where she had her studio.” It’s a perch above the living room, perhaps intended for storage, but filled now for me with the echoes of canvas and paint, perspective and absence.

I didn’t much like her poetry then, but as I’ve lived in the former space of the naked girl I understand it more. I know with certainty that she was naked often in the rooms I now inhabit; I can feel it in the air, in the hardwood and windowpanes. This apartment has become as one of her garments, a cast off and a shedding.

She’s gone from this town, but what remains for me of this women I never knew, but for her frequent rhyming spectacles of things intimate and tactile, what remains is an image of surrender, the surrender of habits and the retention of the essential, the confidence of self in accepting and displaying what is most true about who we are, and the grace to let everything else fall away from time to time.

Her poetry was meant to be bohemian and it always struck me as silly when she would move the crowd to jeers and whistles with her erotic gin and pregnant tone of voice. But she was fully present while other poets hid behind their careful use of language. I would cheer with the crowd if she would read again of afternoons in bathtubs, curling toes and yawning, scratching hips and joining lips and lying long and lounging.

I have my memories of such afternoons, where the world is left behind to comfort. I shelter in these memories as she once sheltered in the alcove above my stairs, sitting naked but for splattered paint, free from all the harder things of life which one could wish to shed.