The Daily State
Anacapri, April 2023
The fly watches the spider, the spider
the lizard, the lizard the man, who is I.
If the space between spider and fly
were an inch more narrow or a smidgen wider,
it all might have ended half a minute ago.
But overhead gulls caterwaul unregarded,
while two ships, one coming in and one getting started,
pass dramatically by—or so I say but don’t truly know,
watching as I am lizard, spider, and fly,
waiting for what might happen to happen
right in front of me, the man who is I
and who now has the order fouled up in some fashion.
Blue ship headed toward Napoli, white toward Sicily?
I can’t remember which is which
and don’t dare look up: the least eye twitch
might set all in motion prematurely,
and right now in our frozen group of four
nothing just continues to occur, tension
grows, ships pass, and dark apprehension—
the daily state of things—whines in the morning air.
Their Business
Something else is going on in the river.
– Ted Hughes
They may be breaking some law,
skinny-dipping among spawning salmon.
They are lovely, yes, but let us also say
of a somewhat advanced age, a woman
and a man, having swum into the deep pool,
now treading water where the shallows begin,
watching salmon hens excavate with strong tails
their redds, while the stout bucks with their milts look on.
They are unaware we watch them watch
the salmon, who may also be unaware
they are watched, or do not mind being watched
by something else in the river, as they also are,
this adventurous, elder couple,
who eventually swim back to the rock shelf
they entered the pool from and, with some trouble,
climb back out, and sit, like beauty itself.
He puts an arm around her shoulder, warms her,
then takes her hand and leads her back to their clothes.
Of course they understand spawning’s order.
After, the salmon die, as everyone knows.
Their business was the business of seeing,
as was ours, without their knowing they were seen,
as ours was also in some way savoring,
what they savored, seeing salmon spawn.
Robert Wrigley’s most recent book of poems is The True Account of Myself as a Bird (Penguin, 2022). A collection of essays (mostly about poetry), Nemerov’s Door, was published by Tupelo Press in 2021. He lives in the woods of northern Idaho, with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes.
Read Robert Wrigley’s second Letter to America poem, published on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021, and his first Letter to America, published January 1, 2017, as well as two poems plus three poems, published originally in Terrain.org.
