​The Elephant Seal
 
Observe, if you please, the male elephant seal:
note the giant proboscis which helps him
to roar like a dinosaur in the mating season.
Watch him attack any male who dares
encroach upon his harem, and marvel
as heads butt and teeth gouge and lumps of gore
fly everywhere. See the marks upon his leathery skin!
They are the scars of battle, more treasured than a trophy.
Ten of his women weigh as much as one of him,
perhaps because he never eats vegetables. He’s not selfish;
sometimes he lets his beta bull sample a woman.
When he starts to moult, he goes inland, sulks, doesn’t eat
for weeks. He tells Debbie he’s working late, tells Karen
he’ll leave Joanne, forgets to pick up the kids.

​harem, n., 1a:  Esp. in the Ottoman Empire: the separate, private part of a house reserved for the women of the household, and access to which is prohibited to all except family members and female servants. [OED] 
Having a body is an act of hospitality; the nature of corporeal existence necessitates it, its ephemerality, its brevity, its fluctuation and inconsistencies. The body of the mother as always expanding, always absorbing and subsuming unkindnesses into an enveloping act of forgiveness, which arises from the primordial condition of love.
 
I think of the body as a fine layer of skin stretched and stuffed, like those grotesque taxidermy animals in poses of pseudo action. I think about how women have used their bodies as filters for spaces, as mediators through which safe and unsafe things have passed. The female body as enacting the cleaning task, the process of purification that makes possible the sanitization of these spaces for male bodies. How the kitchen is always tidied and a meal on the table, and the shit is scrubbed from the sides of the pan, and the child is asleep and quiet in the crib by the time the man returns home to the house that is the woman’s place but the man’s property.
 
I think about how my grandmother could not pass through a space without using her body to improve it, like a drop of tincture in a glass of water that changes the taste in a subtle but deliberate way. If you are a poor woman from a big family in the Welsh valleys this is part of how you move through space; you cannot pass a side table without restacking the coasters, or walk across a mat without bending to pick up balls of hair and dust, you cannot stoke the fire without sweeping up the ash. Even in the futility of these tasks – where the unconscious ash will always build without consideration of the recentness with which it was cleared - there is always the thin veneer of cleanliness, which is respectability, which is womanhood.
 
When my mother does a clean that is below the standard she sets for herself (which is actually a standard my grandmother, her mother and all their husbands have set for her) she calls it ‘a lick and a promise’ and I cannot stop thinking about this phrase. A lick of polish and a hot, pink tongue against the soot black scythe black grate of the hearth. A promise to be better, cleaner, more thorough next time. A lick and a promise and a wink between women, that this is only a temporary condition.