Roadside Math
On a whim, roaming
county wetlands,
the whistling
Saturday naturalist
hijacks an ungainly
weed-wrack nest
slung twixt a muddle
of alder stilts, where
avian instinct plus
one yellow beak,
every spring,
fashions a future.
No roadside dissector
of love, no matter how
nosy, teases out
34 curls of willow
bark without cracking
the silted cup
devotion shaped
for starlit nights
and throaty lullabies:
the parched, inmost
cradle shaped
from mudflat dough,
yearly reburnished
by breath and breast.
Reed by reed, the man’s
weekend impulse
morphs into project.
Curiosity beggars
accommodation. Leaves,
once long as an arm,
now artfully kinked,
suggest EKG waves,
stark and erratic, as if
clocking the smallest
expectant heart, already
en route. The sky
clouds over. The first
peevish spits of rain
smudge his data, totaled
now, by a faltering hand:
142 chances to hatch regret.
Cursive
Hello life, so quietly near / slack-jawed / mercurial. In the shallows a fish swivels, a fleeting lowercase “j” as in jewel, with one crystal bauble of breath for the dot. O, underwater cursive, you materialize like the past, in serial glints: fin / then scale / gill / tail. Someone must praise each delicate whirl of the inner clockwork. Harder to parse that wily old flounder, Time, whose funhouse eye drifts down the body, the slow glutinous slide a sign of maturing. Onshore, a woman can sidearm a flat stone, sculpt the swelter of August air with her pain. As if spring-wound the fish rolls … then bolts. Almost opalescent, the supple vacancy hovers—as when, trespassing every clock in her house, sorrow erases the hour hands, their inching hope. Where does love go when it dies? A stranger’s story can move like a riptide between the listener’s ears. Marauders killed a man’s dog / his wife / his sons. Child, he seems to say, his voice floating somewhere inside her head as if he were her own dear father, when we are drowning, how slowly the body learns sadness can swim.
Estuary Café
… bond or marry or breed or starve.
– Lorrie Moore
The moon with its silver pulleys
hauls out the sea, where the last
breakers swagger ashore.
Shoals of starry flounders
tilt into deep water, dodging
Old Solitary, that cutthroat raptor
whose tattered wingspan shadows
exposed rocks, frescoed with slime.
In the brackish shallows,
black-stockinged Madame Egret
wriggles her wormy toes like lures,
her scissoring beak ready
for crayfish cruising at low tide, while
mud shrimp and crabs, self-interred,
conserve breath, awaiting
the incoming wash. O Mother Otter,
breast each headlong wave,
enfold your wayward pups,
as you might rub our faces too,
against fur like no other,
each of us lovingly tethered, for now,
in windings of kelp. Why muzzle
the feast, inherent in frolic? Starving,
we forego backstroking away
from seething reprisal, the way
it feels, the way it feeds
among patrons at risk
in one more moonlit dive
where too many eaters
double as entrées. And choke
on this: how lavishly
we entertain an abiding
crush: our own destruction.
Laurie Klein is the author of the poetry collection Where the Sky Opens and a chapbook, Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh. A recipient of the Merton Prize and a Pushcart nominee, her work appears in numerous journals, recordings, and anthologies.
Read or listen to poetry by Laurie Klein previously published in Terrain.org: “Stamina” and “In Flagrante.”
Header photo by cowins, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Laurie Klein by Dean Davis Photography.
