pith…

Miles from Somewhere

I

A plane descends,
throws its shadow
on the ground: a giant cross,
a giant, all-consuming cross.
A man and a woman
are walking, the shadow
eats them briefly, then sun
again.

II

It’s tricky, isn’t it, talking about love,
like talking about socialist art (demanded, of course,
in the strictest realism, else said to sap
the foundations of socialism), he says,
too smugly, she thinks and already wishes him
gone.

III

A writer often doesn’t know what he does.
But he always knows what he doesn’t do.

IV

He opens a little box for her. Inside:
a cross, hanging
from 14 inches of gold, Italian.
He thinks
he knows her so well.

V

Nobody knows
how long the birds
have been flying
overhead.

VI

They are tired
and her feet are bloody.
They have been eating
sand for two days.
The sun is getting closer
to their hearts.

VII

Kill me again,
Kill me again.
After a while,
he picks up a rock.

VIII

The old sailor
thumbs through
logbooks: how large
this earth had been.

.

And I Say This

A whale has been found with a harpoon in its body which, by its markings, showed that it must have been hurled at the whale at least 36 years ago. - Scientific American, April 1900

It is dead, finally and for good, having returned
again and again to this shore, at first angry and relentless,
later, gray and choking with blubber. Just
which leg did you lose to the whale? The difference
between beginning and ending: the wound
refusing to heal, the king refusing to die even though
someone asked all the right questions, the carpenter
refusing to nail himself to the cross. Just which leg
did you lose? This whale, beached and cloudy,
an exclamation mark rising from his back, this sand
animal, this great dune, rocked back and forth
by the waves, this bulging sacrifice? Just which leg?
Its body, washed and baptized again and again,
rotting and picked at by gulls, wasted, stripped
not for profit or fame, not quite right
for this place without shadows, not returning. Just.

.

I Apologize

For fucking up, for fucking down, for cursing,
for fornicating, for irrigating, for extricating
testimony from innocent bystanders by way
of unbearable torture, for backsliding,
for citing, for writing fifty-seven very sad poems.
In my defense I submit that I was egged on
by my brown carpet, a very unhappy
color, an earthy color, a color leading to thoughts
of death. I have ripped the carpet off the floor
and laid tiles, bright sunshiny yellow tiles
to atone for my sins. For making, for breaking,
for aching to strip the sound from a note
[what was I was trying to find?], for taking
your hand and signing the orders, for waiting,
for wanting. Oh. That’s a good one. Wanting
to stay, say, leave a trace: a snail on dry river
bed. The earth there was brown, and I have already
tiled it yellow, there is water now, the most violent
shape, seeping through sealed caskets,
inducing a sense of vertigo, a desire to fall, fall
into, well, what is there? Baby Jessica
and three dozen camera crews tell me
that rebirth is possible, even from brown earth.
They don’t understand the miracle
of tiling, of exiling all seasons except winter,
because no one wants to be reminded
year after year after year. So I propose
a steady snow, a steady surrender
to all things white and erased.
For standing, for sitting, for sleeping, for
breathing, for sneezing, for blinking, for stopping
for nothing, for seeing, for peeing, for being
bored and whored to the highest bidder
For arriving here wrinkled and screaming,
for leaving the same.

.

From Now On

It will all be true: the birth
of the compass: imagine:
China, 2000 years ago.

A sailor watches as men
throw an iron rock on the floor.
Without fail

it points toward a certain star,
a certain north. Soon all ships
of the Chinese fleet possess this magic

rock: if you look long and hard
enough, you will notice
that there are no miracles

on which faith is predicated,
you will notice
that the world cradles in its stone

another stone that no one has
yet unearthed.

.

© Claudia K. Grinnell, 2000. Used by permission of the author.