Category: Poetry

When Israel finished its retraction of the rights of all immigrants, women, queers, and others, and reduced the Knesset to an advising body for a permanent non-elected executive, when that nation stripped away the rights of the remaining Palestinians, all rights, until they were but animals before the law, the day came when soldiers entered East Jerusalem . . .

I

In ethanol, the chitin of a crayfish fades,

a carapace of rubber and silk.

Its joints articulate, tail spreads under pressure, uropods from telson

under a microscope, the jaggedness of its mouthparts, a question.

 

The lab is silent as I inspect ten-legged aliens, door open for fumes.

Is preservation respect for the dead?

 

II

November, I am split, cephelothorax . . .

The Atlantic horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus,

is not a crab at all—

more an ancient, armored spider,

here 500 million years.

 

Choose the right vessel: long and straight.

Choose a good insertion point: key to success.

Tourniquet, swab, stab, advance,

occlude, connect, untie, secure:

the sequence for an intravenous line.

 

Horseshoe crab blood is blue

from . . .

I come from another ocean

just as deep, just as mazarine

 

with tides that swell and churn

of cloves, anise, cardamom,

 

a constellation. Where north?

Where east? A foreboding task

 

for someone so close

to the equator.

 

Do not drown. Do not drown.

A leatherback turtle

 

clutches together

an archipelago just for you.

 

In a hushed patois,

you gill fish and hem

 

layers upon . . .

When you really want to break someone,

you take their kids.

 

We’re a simple animal, and bearing costs.

 

After the storm I go down the beach,

visit time, lenses of shell on shell,

thousands of practical years of

canoes and oysters, fires on the sand,

veils of cedar and the red bark of madrones

bright against the bluffs.

I call a guy I know from the tribe and we walk it, together, . . .

Turns out poetic justice

—for me anyway—

might mean

dying in a flood.

 

At age twelve

I had the privilege

of swimming in The Great Barrier Reef.

Floating among dayglow coral,

a psychedelic spacewalk

through old growth aquatic forest.

 

At age forty

I met myself there

and asked him if

two thousand, seven hundred pounds of CO2

was worth it.

 

I screamed until

my face caught . . .

After Hokusai’s Breaking Waves (Ink on silk)

 

The sea and the cliff

embrace like wrestlers,

he is   merciless

gutting him with his waves.

Above, the sky is sparse,

and the trees   are blurring in the wind.

 

What of the lake

at the foot of this cliff?

 

An audience of clouds gather

and the water leaves in ripples.

 

A village watches from a distance. . . .

rising again        stumps of oak pine birch willow hazel

emerge from the sand                     Noah’s trees

 

their roots stiffened underground       protectors . . .

Slender frogs spring, weightless,

weaving through bog cotton.

 

Rows of cut turf monuments come to a sheer drop—

the bog hole: a cliff of richest fudge

feeding into a red wine gorge, thick with tannins.

 

Here, all pleasures compress: dull, heavy, glutting.

At this end of the field everything pulls

down with a gravity of its own, draws us

into sumptuous density.

 

Grant . . .