The cold is a mother
as generous as the space
between the stars. I gave her
my discontent & my distance:
all those older & more restless selves
who are still out there, moving away
at the speed of light.
I grinned for Polaroid & single-lens
reflex alike, but inside
I was wincing. Cold.
I learned how to knit
when I was seven: scarves
& sweaters, socks & gloves, maps
& pastures & that long deep lake
I later loved. By then I’d crossed
oceans, no mere mermaid;
you couldn’t touch me without noticing
the scars from ships’ propellers
& orca attacks, the stubborn barnacles.
On land I was a sycamore, rich
in baubles no one wanted,
struggling to peel down
to a warmer skin.
*
See the photo reponse by Rachel Rawlins, “Advert for a summer holiday.”
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Dog Logic
- The Colors of Noise
- Crossing Wales
- Memo from the CEO of Little Prince, Inc.
- Poems to be shaved into the hair of the author’s back
- Desideratum
- Capture
- Living in Analog
- Organ Meats: A Primer
- Walking Weather
- Beach Glass
- Tree Without Birds
- Hermit
- The Captain’s Reverses
- Pets
- Exchange
- Heart
- Digital
- The Fullness of Time
- Pandora
- Reading the Icelandic Sagas
- Hit the Lights
- Vagina Dialogue
- Helmsman
- Old Norse Family Values
- On Hold
- Heels
- Looking for the Reader
- The conversation continues: two videopoems
Oh. I don’t know if I understand this, but I know I want to read it again and again.
Read and read last night. It’s even better today! What reach that it can be read as both as personal and planetary, not in a weak correlation, but in a reinforcing dovetail – an utter confusion of you and the world. Love, love, love. Love the breadth of time-space, the luminous particulars, the awesomely sense defying, but righteous, last line.
Sorry to pant. This just struck me crazy.
What a great Poem, Dave.
You really do have it in you.
This is fantastic writing.
Thank you.
Bob BrueckL
Well, geez — thanks, guys!
Oh my, made me tremble, with what? Hope, wonder, love… Just keep writing it, whatever.
(They are London planes, I think, not sycamores as we know them.)
Thanks for the kind comment! No, in this poem they are sycamores (mostly because more people have have heard of them, but also because they are more closely associated with water than their very closely related cogeners), just as the narrator of this poem has lived in “analog” rather than “analogue.” It’s part of the trans-Atlantic translation process, in other words, with which our on-going conversation must contend.