Meteor Crater
Arizona
A gaze across the crater is eaten
by emptiness. The rocks are every size,
only slightly weathered,
as if impact was minutes ago
and the silence the silence after tragedy,
mutely offering evidence
that an ordinary desert
may explode,
so that fifty thousand years later,
rocks look as if they had just been thrown.
The perimeter rises in a ridge
puckered like the edges of a wound.
Through a pair of fixed binoculars you see
that over there, on the opposite rim,
a rock stands on its end like a loaf of bread, looks
as if it would fit in a bag. But
a label on the instrument says this is
a HOUSE SIZE ROCK.
Out of every crack,
a tough little plant is forcing itself.
The whole place feels like a lesson in grief.
And, sweeping across it, a punishing wind.
Cabin
Time is not always a slow river:
sometimes there are
lakes in it,
places you can row out, even at night,
hearing, at the surface, sounds of water,
and sensing, underneath,
tall silences.
For years, we changed nothing in the cabin, yet
saw it all grow older. And ourselves.
But I kept coming, hoping for a while
to be still, to row across
the surfaces of my own mind.
Yet here, still,
I feel time’s slow eddy,
as if some obstruction snags me from below,
not stilling, but letting me revolve—
relief to move without a destination,
even to swim, briefly,
in that temporary pond.
Feel
When a wave of grief unfurls,
is my body the beach it washes,
my mind a shorebird running
from the noisy line of foam?
That is one way to describe it—
but sometimes my mind and body tumble
together under the break, caught,
not knowing which is which until
the water retreats and they stand up together.
I begin to think my interest in grief
is perhaps a form of my interest in love.
I don’t know why I find one easier to believe,
unmistakable as the taste of salt on the lips,
or, in the mouth, the grainy feel of sand.
Nan Cohen’s books are two full-length poetry collections, Rope Bridge and Unfinished City, and a chapbook, Thousand-Year-Old Words. The recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and an NEA Literature Fellowship, she lives in Los Angeles, California. Learn more at NanCohen.org.
Header photo of Meteor Crater in Arizona by turtix, courtesy Shutterstock.
