That Said Read Online Free Page A

around my neck. The other
as its fist hooks and jabs my head away.
Ear to the conch, ear to the pillow,
beneath a canopy of bathers each night
I hear the voice and pry the jaws apart,
choke on the tangle of sable hair that blurs
the dead girl’s mouth: that anarchy
of breath dog-soft and still at my neck.
She calls from the water glass I drink from.
From my own throat when I swallow.

Sounding the Lake
This is a remarkable depth for so small an area, but not an inch of it can be spared in the imagination.
—Thoreau
    Â 
The one cloud
in a blue sky
is also the one cloud
    Â 
in the lake, the feeling
of something
to be distrusted
    Â 
that cloud
constantly
reinventing itself.
    Â 
In long light
minnows move like stars
in shallow water.
    Â 
Who can calculate
the light-years
from fish to fish?
    Â 
You’re living
your whole life
with someone
    Â 
who is more
important to you
than skin.
    Â 
I watch the white
boats shift
lakeside to lakeside.
    Â 
But the cloud
in the lake
is more beautiful,
    Â 
its shimmer,
in which I constantly
mistake myself
    Â 
and fall in. This is
how it is
with you and me.
    Â 
I would rather be the lake
filling the silent
yawn of the earth
    Â 
where trout
move
through clear water.
    Â 
I would rather be
the trout, or
the dream of the trout,
    Â 
the spasm of cloud
in the trout’s brain,
oh anything but this
    Â 
feeling, which is
what breaks me, friend,
when you enter.

Eye Level
If exposed to total darkness for seventy-two hours, the retina degenerates, causing partial loss of vision
.
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    1. North
    Â 
Wisteria worked its patient violence on the house.
Working at civility, we moved
from room to room like diplomats,
dividing china, dismantling the easy chair.
Out from the linen closet, the tent collapsed
into a small bag of telescoping poles; the compass;
the Coleman stove’s blue bracelet of flame.
Your Swiss Army knife tamed any emergency—
miniature corkscrew, screwdriver, fish scaler, file—
blades snapped into that miracle of steel.
I slipped it in my pocket, the red handle
shining like a deep wound in my palm. Only this
I kept to cut my narrow path away from you.
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    2. Haiti: Skin Diving
    Â 
My legs break
the thick glass floor
of water.
    Â 
My foot magnifies
blue as the foot
of a corpse.
    Â 
One unshuttable eye
spans my face
and sees easily
    Â 
what two eyes
can barely see.
I breathe
    Â 
and go under.
Sea urchins fan
black sprays of quills.
    Â 
Sea fans sway
at right angles
to the current.
    Â 
My snorkel’s ball
spins in its atmosphere
of breath
    Â 
like tiny Mars
above my head.
The sixth sense
    Â 
must be gravity!
I measure distance
now by fin-kicks,
    Â 
the sun’s angle.
Finned, the swimmer
wades backward
    Â 
to the sea,
waist-deep, to plunge
and turn almost
    Â 
weightless inside
the moving
body once again.
    Â 
All the lyre-tailed,
stippled, rainbow-
flecked bodies
    Â 
flash—shaped by water.
A school of fish
spills from the coral
    Â 
and circles me.
I stiffen
without moving.
    Â 
My fingertip’s
slightest tremor
could shatter that order,
    Â 
blurring
as my breath
clouds the mask.
    Â 
    3. Port-au-Prince
    Â 
In the thatched
choucoune,
I learned Creole proverbs
from the maid.
The fish
trusts the water and in the water
it is cooked.
    Â 
Was that thunder in the harbor?
Smoke funneled from the Iron Market.
The gardener shinnied up a palm tree
like a sailor up a mast,
binoculars bouncing against his back.
The maid translated his shouts
half in Creole, half in French,
and still I could not connect.
I telephoned the Embassy—
heard, fractured by static,
“...an old military plane
crashed in the street,
skidding into a
tap-tap
jammed with passengers.”
    Â 
When the hawk strikes,
if he doesn’t take feathers
he takes straw.
    Â 
All varieties of blood
bloom at eye level.
Flamboyant.
Belle Mexicaine.
Acres of poinsettia
flame up the cliffs
along the Kenscoff Road.
    Â 
The last