This week's poem is hard for me to get a handle on. While poetry can distill, refine and give meaning to life and help us understand it, sometimes all a poem does (or needs to do) is reflect it. Adolescence is filled with as much misunderstanding as understanding. As a transitional phase, it is without clearly defined meaning. It is the search for meaning, a search for finding one's place.

There is much to this poem I do not understand, so it vividly brought back my own adolescent feelings of awkwardness. I can't say that I enjoyed this poem, but then I can't say I enjoyed not knowing how I fit into the world, nor the lonliness of adolesence either. "The most careless girl in the class had the most exquisite body" is well crafted. With a few brush stokes, Erica Ehrenberg has deftly painted a vivid picture of a disorienting age.

The most careless girl in the class had the most exquisite body
(As a limerick) by NoStar

Without care, How her exquisite bod
Had exhausted us, made us feel odd
Yet, she seemed not to know
She affected us so
And self-conscious, I felt like a fraud

Here for the ease of comparison is the original poem.

The most careless girl in the class had the most exquisite body
By Erica Ehrenberg

The most careless girl in the class had the most exquisite body,
the constant proximity of which exhausted us,
not least because her awkwardness,
so unlike ours, manifested itself as a license
to kick off all consciousness of her limbs
like a branch one smacks out of one's face
in the woods in an act of defiance, almost contempt,
whose ironic outcome was the deepest inhabitation
of flesh I have ever seen. It was through her body
that I wanted to pass close to the bodies of the boys.
She would take me home with her and all but throw me
into the dark dynamics of her empty-seeming household,
which I felt to be hung with heavily stitched draperies
that concealed not only the rooms but the beings inside.
She took me there and spun me into her weird intimacy
in which my own self-consciousness was a pestering
insect— stupid, negligible. She would speak to people, to men,
to anyone in the streets and walk just as quickly off,
implicating me in the desire she aroused,
her uncontainability streaking through me a blazing
trail of lights from high in the whitest part of my head
down into my lungs, my entrails,
the part of me that wasn't breathing.