FIVE POEMS
Sailor's Warning
Educational
From APPLIES TO ORANGES
From APPLIES TO ORANGES
"A Total Victory for Chaos"
There's no one to rock but the waves,
and the waves don’t care, the waves don’t care
even about being the waves.
Only you will care for them—measuring
their length and breadth, their height and color.
You will learn the wind:
Thunderheads at an insane distance,
dawn a red slick along
the ocean’s defeated perspective.
You’ll know this like the halfmoons
of your nailbeds, hardbitten, salt-stung.
You’ll smell the diesel sweat
of a thousand ships, become one with tar and rope,
the waves that don’t give a damn,
and know yourself, at a distance.
You’ll know that no one knows you.
Two dioramas down, the drunken sailor
Admires a deep-sea diver, standing
On the sea bed like a summons,
A dull blank porthole of a mask
Asking visitors to just forget, forget it all.
The sailor leans his forehead against the glass
As I take off to circle aimlessly
Beneath the life-sized blue whale
Strung from the ceiling, caught mid-dive,
Its gaping mouth an invitation
To a kind of darkness that could be total,
A promise that could hold you closer,
Never stop singing you back to the salt.
Lambing time at the Hotel Cordillera—
all firm flesh and soft angles as
young men the color of graham crackers
pad down the sugar sand to test
the waters with their bodies. The girls,
brought here by snowbird parents
for a week of tropical sunshine, sip
virgin mimosas beneath umbrellas—
all orange juice and ginger ale
and the soft laughter that comes
from watching boys, stifling squeals,
and sooner or later hands behind
the cabana, eyelashes fluttering
in the old language of fans, their
yes-please, and oh-if-you-would,
that definitive shut-me-and-shake.
This is how stalagmites build, meaning
explodes, how the camel’s back becomes
a bower heady with oranges. Brides
came for miles to cut crowns of blossoms
from my orchard’s boughs, but now
not even spiders mate there, and the air
contains only satellites, machines
sending sounds to other machines.
Twilight reflects terrible intentions.
The cord’s been cut from the phone.
If there’s a problem from here on,
Houston, you’ll have to go it alone.
The bed’s unmade. New-washed clothes
Go unfolded. The dining room’s a storehouse
For mail, old checks, sunglasses, bracelets,
the jetsam of days and days.
*
We’re gonna be museum pieces, someday.
We’re gonna dry up and get stable.
Well-catalogued.
*
For now, fold yourself into rumpled sheets, pick
your outfit from off the piles on the floor.
Tell the TV that you like what it’s doing, give the fridge a bye
on the tomato with a life of its own.
*
We’ve eased into splendor.
Into broken chickens and whole mermaids.
Shoes traipsing the floors unfooted,
until we trip over them, unshod.
*
We left some glasses on the roof. We left our books outside.
We left our bodies tumbled up.
*
Yankees v. Pirates. A room away, I hear the gasps floating over
ZZ Top opining
on women and their attitudes.
is an attorney. She is the author of two chapbooks, Mayport (Poetry Society of America) and Novelty Act (Ugly Duckling Presse).