Isn’t the air also a body, moving?

Isn’t the air also a body, moving? is a poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natalie Diaz. It was originally published as part of a dialogue with fellow poet Ada Limón in the New Yorker with the surtitle “Envelopes of Air”.

In Natalie Diaz's poem, air is seen as an entity that moves inside and outside the body, as well as between bodies. It creates an embodied space in which spoken and unspoken communication unfolds in both the personal and interpersonal realms.

Air seems to be in a category of its own, endlessly infinite, intimately close and everything in between. At the same time, it bridges the ever-changing perceived distances between two beings. In this poem, I think, Natalie Diaz is also suggesting that air allows multiple perspectives to coexist, again within and without us. That the body of air has the potential to find balance, just as breathing is always a balancing act towards homeostasis. For Natalie Diaz, it is the balance between her overwhelming grief for her native land and her perseverance to preserve it, the art of carrying a burden lightly.

It holds the red jet of the hawk
in its hand of dust.
How is it that we know what we are?
If not by the air
between any hand and its want—touch.

This is my knee, since she touches me there.
This is my throat, as defined by her reaching.
I am touched—I am.

What pressure—the air.
Buoying me now along a minute
the size of a strange room.
Who knew air could be so treacherous
to move through? An old anxious sea,

or waking too early in a coppered
and indigo morning,
or the bookmark she left
near the end of the book—
all deep blues and euphemisms
for my anxieties.

Sometimes I don’t know how to make it
to the other side of the bridge of atoms
of a second. Except for the air

breathing me, inside, then out. Suddenly,
I am still here.
Escaping must be like this
for the magician and mortal both—
like lungs and air. A trick

of bones and leaving any capture—a breath.
Everything is iron oxide or red this morning,

here in Sedona. The rocks, my love’s mouth,
even the chapel and its candles. Red.
I have been angry this week. A friend said,
Trust your anger. It is a demand for love.
Or it is red. Red is a thing

I can trust—a monster and her wings,
cattle grazing the sandstone hills like flames.

Caboose cars of trains were once red,
and also the best parts of the trains—
the heat and shake of what promised to pass.
Finally, the red and the end of them.

Maybe this living is a balance of drunkenness
off nitrogen and the unbearable
atmosphere of memory.

From the right distance, I can hold anything
in my hand—the hawk riding a thermal,
the sea, the red cliff, my love
glazed in fine red dust, your letter, even the train.
Each is devoured in its own envelope of air.

What we hold grows weight.
Becomes enough or burden.

What if it’s true about the air and our hands?
That they’re only an extension
of an outside reaching in?
I’m pointing to me and to you to look
out at this world.

Here you can find Ada Limón and Natalie Diaz discussing "Envelopes of Air"

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