Friday, December 2, 2022

Kevin Varrone : poem I wrote sitting across the tidepool from you

from Report from the McCarthy Society, Vol. 1 No. 1

 

 

 

 

                    
last night I dreamt I saw your archive
of intertidal martyrs
in formation on the nubbins

                    
& this morning I saw ernie sweeping out front of wallace’s before opening.
he bent over & picked up something shiny
like a boy plucking treasure out of flotsam

                    
cormorants lined the trap float
& spread their wings tip-to-tip
like a week of uniform shirts pegged on a line to dry

                    
in another dream
you sat midden-mouthed on the nubbins
as the long more of the sea smelted swells out behind you

                    
there are things I would confess to you in the half-spaces
when the tide is out
that I can never say inland

                    
nothing seems ordinary
that the tide leaves behind––any bit of any thing
that endures force & accumulates must be an offering

                    
or so seems to say your wrack archive,
melancholy selkie, as you keen
like a poor-tide saint caught unawares, in the in-between

                    
if it’s so that your father could talk the bark off a tree
then maybe you can write the sea detritus
with your dreckmouth into a midden-history

                    
I can’t imagine a whole ocean in these little pools of water
left behind, but there’s enough sea for longing, & enough time
to bide time before the next high

                    
the intertides are a threshold measured out in tiny bits of calm:
there’s always something shiny, something smooth,
something holding heat & something bruised on its return from a deeper realm

                    
the bay way out where it flattens looks like it's been smelted,
except in patches where light breaks the clouds & makes a small sheet of foil
flattened by a frugal grandma for reuse.

                    
if we broke the world down completely
& rebuilt it from scratch, using only words,
I think it might look exactly as it already does

                    
& then you lean back & your neck goes long to take another oyster by the throat,
& you toss the empty half-shell back to the sea
& the fog rolls in, expanding to the liminal edges of the coastline

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kevin Varrone is the author of three full-length collections of poetry and numerous chapbooks, most recently how to count to ten (above/ground press, 2021). He teaches at Temple University and splits time between Philadelphia and midcoast Maine.

 

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