Inland: For Cousteau
The continent buckles here to comfort
and confine, but let morning light through fog
and a mountain remembers
the sea, oaks branching like coral,
wreathes of mist snaking into seaweed.
Cliffs shelve off into gray ignorance
where one might fall for years, abstracted
into the soft element that nibbles and unknits skin,
peral-colored glow starting from the eyes,
wherever the hands move.
*
All memories gather in one green swell—
light washing over him, dimming as he pulls himself
deeper, reaching for the dark.
In a million years, we will all be there
at the floor of the trenches, attending his slow descent.
Already we lower our dead among the currents of earth,
and they set out, rudderless and sure,
under plains, under mountains, toward the sea.
*
This morning—every sound damped by fog,
birds hushed by fog like stareres in the utter depth—
the only music is the ear's own sea-music.
We should float through the empty streets
before the sun pulls them back to shore.
We should remember how bodies love water,
dreaming in the marrow that lost approximation to flight—
tides holding everything, leaving
and returning, the million hands of the sea.
Monet: Camille Monet on her Deathbed
1.
This face about to sink out of sight
through the paint: empty flesh
slacks back on the skull as he sorts
grades of day across pale curves of skin,
analyzing ripples of bed sheets.
She floats—her hair's final dishevelment
framed by the light of an hour
before the arrival of morticians—
floats between the darkness of her eyes
and the other darkness severing us
from that day of singular color.
2.
Work as devotion in the priesthood of what is:
setting out his paints and choosing brushes,
the rote kitchenry of accustomed labor,
and then his attention narrows to a brush stroke
and the following brush stroke, building her,
the odd set of her mouth testing his craft.
Any worker stands that way some days,
before a loom or on the line at an auto plant,
lightly, swaying slightly on the surface of time
as she watches the melding yarn or twists
on a thousandth washer, and the factory
fades around her to a sweet blur, the century
declines to quitting time as long shadows mass
at the windows, pigeons in the rafters
cooing like the long day's welcome to sleep. |