Three Poems
The Ocean Sings of Incendiary Things
To begin with, it was beautiful.
To begin, it’s essential
we admit that it was beautiful.
[tab5]A solar flare. A break[/tab5]
[tab5]in the beacon-speak of lights.[/tab5]
[tab10]All seabirds and sailors[/tab10]
[tab5]blinked in perfect unison. From chutzpah[/tab5]
[tab5]into flail, from hum[/tab5]
[tab5]into sizzle crash,[/tab5]
[tab5]the come-apart[/tab5]
[tab5]was counterpunch, the wheeze[/tab5]
[tab5]of pressurized air was heraldry,[/tab5]
[tab10]a droop[/tab10]
[tab5]in the fuselage that focused the heart.[/tab5]
Now come marauder, come meal,
be erected in their honour.
Come reducer, sob-machine, emperor
of sulk and sunlit private moments.
Reckoner. Decision. Come sprinkle your storyboards
across their country notions. The friendliness exhibit zeroes in.
They’ll see parts of you in beaver dams, pocket lint,
school lunches. Come berate their histrionics. But before that,
come be heard. Be soluble, smothered,
pulled apart and boiled clean.
Come retrieve your beauty. I believe
in beauty, in the
wish-thin packaging
and pander of the word.
Two Theories of Impact
1.
[tab10]That the problem[/tab10]
burrowed in unbroken underwater,
minus the wings and other
peripherals unsuited to
the shift in local gravity. The pressure differential
drew a plan for its attack, then kicked out
the windows, stippled down the vessel’s length
along its opened pores.
[tab15]Then certain objects[/tab15]
could see where they stood, and the sudden
cartoon logic forced the interloper open
at its seams, then at its
seams’ seams. Down this insurrection,
the breaking gained momentum and surprised
the unbreakable—a bolt, its head
shorn free from the shaft,
a crumpled medal found inside
a crevice carved from bone.
An air bubble burping at the surface.
An oil slick.
Six or seven seagulls
squawking in the din.
2.
[tab10]That at a certain speed[/tab10]
the salt in ocean water coalesces into concrete.
At a certain speed, spun momentum can
churn objects into dust,
[tab15]dust that embraces itself[/tab15]
as it death rolls down the sky.
[tab20]This is why[/tab20]
they never found a piece of the wreckage too heavy
to be hauled from the water by hand. Most of it
escaped microscopic,
[tab15]lifted on the wind[/tab15]
and carried, a cloud,
blind, towards the shore. We call this theory
Immediate Translation.
And it asserts that the first island in
gets infamous.
So no Mounties but still,
one morning that winter,
a man we all knew
[tab10]woke up,[/tab10]
shot his two young sons
in their sleep, shuffled back
to tell the wife,
the shotgun’s languid afterbirth
folding smoke into the carpet.
Now the wife lives on the mainland,
hangs out with the hairdressers, making
conversation. She’ll catch the young sailors
as they try to slink away, hold their scared new
heads in her hands. You look good, kid.
[tab15]Handsome.[/tab15]
[tab15]Everybody looks their best today.[/tab15]
Songs for the Cool Kids in Towns without Traffic Lights
Those who arrived with graduate degrees
ready to lie fallow on the land but plotted sub-divisions
out of dormant fields.
Those who could speak with some detachment about
the famous local facial features
imported from Europe and left
to fester through centuries
[tab5]of shallow[/tab5]
interbreeding. Notice the pronounced zygomatic arches
and the straightened, simian jawline.
Those who looked in from the periphery
of raucous public meetings, who voted every time
but never saw a single leftist get elected.
Those whose children grew up in the back rows
of civics classes, who slouched in tourist coffee shops shone on
by cable TV. Who bought imported music and
couldn’t believe their bad luck when
[tab5](for all their practiced nonchalance)[/tab5]
the visiting media
[tab5](whose names they knew)[/tab5]
would always pull from the crowd
the most toothless
[tab10]authenticity available[/tab10]
to pester with questions engineered
to pinch the face of the catastrophe.
Yessir, I’ll talk awhile. Are you here to ask
about my zygomatic arches?
