This week’s poem, by Mavis Grail, plays loosely with elements of a villanelle, a type of poem that repeats certain lines in a circling way conducive to meditation or obsession. I love how “Naidic Episode” brings the villanelle’s circling to ideas of beauty, desiring to be beautiful, and the savage, sublime miracle of existing in a body at all.

Grail is a lifelong Mainer and writer who grew up in the Portland poetry scene, where her work was forged and fostered. Some years later, she is once again beginning to share her work with others.

Naidic Episode

The terrible thing is I never stopped
wanting to be beautiful. I waited
for beauty’s arrival, its reward, a blessing

to give me good hair and teeth and skin,
something to inspire magic. I waited
to be beautiful and never stopped

and maybe I wanted to be a god,
a river, a flood, a blessing, a reward
for waiting, the divine wild reaching out

to touch the terrible thing of wanting
for if I must have a body, why not
a blessing? The flood rewards the river

for never stopping, for opening
its skin to the wild. What is goodness
to a river promised to a god,

what is beauty to that gutting truth
of living, the magic of arrival
in this terrible body, mouth of teeth
to want and want at the world?

– Mavis Grail

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Naidic Episode,” copyright 2023 by Mavis Grail, appears by permission of the author.