Annotation

Elizabeth Alexander, "Body of Life"

This poem is in 3 parts and only the first two are quoted here. This is due in part to the interpretive difficulties the third part presents, but presumably, the 3 parts are all about different kinds of losses. The first part is about the loss of girlfriends, the second about the loss of male friends through AIDS, and the 3 rd part, not included here, is about the losses incurred through age and the confrontation with one's own mortality.

The poem opens using a tight, rhymed language that celebrates the intensity of youth, (black) friendship and sexuality. The young women are posing for a picture. They are wearing clingy dresses and are obviously having a blast in their visit to Paris . The inside (‘fabulous flames') mirrors the glamour of the outside (being in Paris in the ‘city of lights'). We are told that the friends drop out of the picture, leaving the speaker until she is the only one left.

The poem then flashes back to 7 years earlier. “The other girls taught shy me to be a diva.” We might assume from this that the trip to Paris marks the end of a long friendship, and that the same girls she was with in Paris had been the speaker's early teachers in sexual matters. It's possible, of course, that the speaker is referring to other girls. In any case, during her year in Washington DC, the speaker had numerous sexual experiences, which she looks back on with some humor as she remembers different episodes: the man who concludes the sexual interlude by asking her to type his resume, a man who oiled her up from head to toe with a moisturizer, another who suspects she is a lesbian because she admires Betty Carter. But just as in part 1 the world is described as ‘beautiful-ugly,' the wild sexual adventures have their downside, as suggested by the phrase “genitals cobbled by passion or disease.” Thus joy and loss, sexual fulfillment and sexually transmitted disease are not far from one another.

The speaker addresses a friend as ‘you,' asking for updates on old friends. The women are dispersed, the men have AIDS. Even the ‘you' is only a memory, since that friend, too has died. She could have been infected herself, given that she had sexual encounters with the same people as those who did get infected (You had a Dominican boyfriend, same as me) but she was lucky and ‘alive.' In remembering all this, including her preserving the memory of her friend, she wants to remember the excitement and the joy, at the same time that she acknowledges the loss. Though the ‘body' is clearly vulnerable to disease and death, she prefers to call it the ‘body of life.'