Skin

There is a quote about skin I remember reading once that describes it as an “artificial boundary,” and goes on to offer the ways in which the world and its contents enter into it while the self wanders out of it.  Spahr’s poetry undoubtedly aligns with this notion that skin simultaneously separates us from, and joins us with, the world around us.  She speaks of the way in which skin is a means of expressing intimacy but also a means of separating and protecting ourselves from one another.  Spahr emphasizes this idea that even as we “press our skins against one another in the night” (Spahr 18) we still remain fundamentally separate.  The function of the repeated images of separation and joining together and Spahr’s appreciation for both processes is highly Whitmanian and reminiscent of the faith Whitman expresses in humanity and the depths of our connections, despite our differences.  The message however in Spahr’s poetry is less sociopolitical and more philosophical, interested in our conceptions of skin as a boundary and our desperation to break it down.  A line which expresses this frustration nicely reads: “I speak of those moments when we do not understand why we must remain separated or joined only in the most mundane ways” (Spahr 19).  Spahr additionally provides that skin, our largest organ, is meant to contain us, and extends the metaphor the way in which our planet’s surface area is relatively small in comparison to the universe, and how our perspectives are limited to this small surface area which we are aware of.  The metaphor explains that our own skin is limiting because it contains what is inside us all, and only so much can wander into it and out of it, yet it is all we know and therefore all we have to come back to and work with.