They catch too many, so the kids pitch fish
at each other in hysterics, then bait
the wire trap with the last of the breadballs.
Ah,
little fins, you go for it. Always
it’s your dumb, blameless hunger. It’s a fact
children want to learn how to play: minnows
swim into traps. The rest is extra,
bodies impaled on sticks, lost in tangled
grass grown cold with nightfall. They get called in
for dinner. Perishing blossom, listen,
he sang, tear it all apart, but love me.
And that red bird, my heart. Pyrotechnic
iris shooting off their Roman candles
from the seawall, the lagoon swells with tide,
all buds burst, a whorled, seductive surface
I want appears. Here, what mystery this
itchy libidinous joy radiates,
here, drink it, the great fountain of eros,
the boundary crosser, the cross-dresser,
category dissolver, best solvent
for hesitancy, temptation’s trumpet
flower in the surge, ka-thump ka-thump ka-
thump, everything I say I want, every
one. Heat and light beat a seesaw rhythm
difficult to interpret mid-sentence,
a body makes its declarations, pulls
to orbit irresistibly ideas
and other minds, strict attractive fluid
force of creation itself looking for
release, for reasons we were made this way.
Sanctus spiritus.
In an old
photo,
I’m squinting bucktoothed at the camera,
standing in the lot at Saint Margaret’s,
still tonguing the nontaste of the wafer.
It’s like eating paper but easier,
I later tell my little brother, who
isn’t listening. When the church burns down
I am grown and long gone out of that town.
I can fit my thumb over the image
of me in a white dress, white crown and veil
(here’s grandmother Nellie in a big hat,
my father smiling, a Kodak blue sky),
but underneath my thumb, I am still there,
worry or something on my face, as if
I could foresee the wandering ahead.
Everyone else
in the picture
is dead.
It was said the man
mixed clay with
his spit
as a poultice for blindness. It was said
the prophet’s tongue received a burning coal
and yet burned
thereupon
only with words.
If I am conjuring, let innocence
answer. It was said that one touch can wake
the dead
weight of the mind
and carry it
home on the stem of a lily. If I
am conjuring, let innocence answer.
A sand dollar broken into quarters.
An osprey climbing out of a spiral.
Signify: the axle assembly was
slinging lubricant from the pinion seal.
Somewhere I read about the caddisworm,
the larva of a caddisfly, whose home
is a silken case stuck outside with trash,
old dead leaves and sticks it drags around, fat
on algae at the bottom of some pond,
camouflaged until its wings are finished.
A very cute trick, although the journey
to that far surface is nowhere described.
Quahoggers off Nayatt Point fade to gray
across the leaden silver wave moiré.
Refusal to acknowledge beauty is
a failure of nerve, so acknowledge it:
screen door slams, summer evening, my neighbor
fends off mosquitoes, standing and calling
the names of his children, and every night
always the one who will never reply,
every time, who he must go out and find.
Three bells chime, bells are twining each leaf on
the vine, spreading wide its branching green palm
as he passes the last golden chime down the
line
down the line
down the line
line
line
line
Test the spirits.
We have so mistaken
flame in the shape of the body
for lust,
any moment of speech
for possession,
have measured dimensions of the planet
using infinitely malleable
shadows, ours,
as a standard unit. Here
they are as fists, here attenuated
as bridges, late afternoon stilting through
the dry meadow across the road.
When I
turn to you your eyes blaze up like watered
sunlight. We have been taught
only some things.
To tell
so color can approximate
the sky
blue inside the curved line moving
about and below the close horizon,
the chord
ringing in the spine, pale grass, all
ideas
of order. I am pointing, now
follow my hand outline snowy hillsides
or section
an orange, still it’s only
pointing:
a white bowl, a flame, three herons
fishing. If one were to say the self is
a bowl,
fills water and brims over, wells
and spills
abundance to be this singing.
Oh that yes I had a thousand voices.
Talk radio strays from rusty pickups.
The whole morning long a fisherman spreads
his feet on broken oystershells, casting,
casting, the thin screeee of the line peeling
off a reel, mixed with cries of early gulls
scheming each other over stolen food,
pitiless in pursuit of a prize dropped
plop on the tideline, some cracked, wretched crab
still waving its one good leg. His line casts
and gulls wheel past the first channel buoy
and water erupts with baitfish leaping
from darkness where cooler swifter water
streams in from the bay. We all of us shout
and point: mayhem on the surface signals
something huge and deep, in an instant
flick the house catches fire, fish slapping at ex-
its, getting nowhere fast, and he goes there
knowing, big ones down below. He goes there.
Karen Donovan has had poems most recently in Conjunctions and Blackbird. Her collection of poems called Fugitive Red, published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1999, won the Juniper Prize. From 1985 to 2005, she co-edited Paragraph, a journal of short prose published by Oat City Press. She works as a writer for a nonprofit educational organization in Providence, Rhode Island.