To be transparent, to contain the world,
To be jellyfish, lucent, mobile, membraned,
Boneless behold me, my mica bits
Expensive steel suspended in my substance,
Afloat in floodwater, swinging shoreward,
Ebbing oceanward, clockless among quick fishes
Striped, sported,
Speckled, stippled
Swishing between braincoral cobbles
Granulated brine, ever in motion.
II
From plate tinted a shell’s hard innerness,
Cerise bleeds, leads chilly dawn.
Sunlight struggles downward through wavelets
Near the sound’s warm surface, visible even
From the cliffs of cottages, it pushes relentlessly
Finding us, feeding us, diatoms, sea-lace,
Anemones, kelp. Breathing in our beds,
Bright sunlight sustains us, formidable father,
We who are oblivious, maybe immortal,
Then softens, slants, abruptly dips. There’s darkness.
Brutally cold, the boom of surf unheard,
Over pocked sand, purely indifference,
Rock ridges ready to razor tenderness
Seawater keeps moving forgetfully.
III
Now on the surface moonlight rests like ice
And the far sky blinks its pointed messages,
Pointless to me, about matter’s beginnings-
Membranous, shapeless, rocking undersea,
Both a thing contained and container of mystery,
Smoothness inside of smoothness, cold in cold,
Wishing only to be as I am, transparent,
Textured fleck afloat in a wet world.
The Crack in Everything (1996)
page 170-171
page 170-171
in The Little Space
by Alicia Suskin OSTRIKER
isbn 0-8229-5680-2
