Thursday, July 4, 2024

Neil Surkan : Two poems

 

 

 

The Seeding of Clouds

On July 21, 2022, The Guardian published an interactive photograph taken by Nasa of Lake Mead’s “extreme withering.” By swiping across the image from Then to Now, readers could witness the dramatic decrease in the lake’s size between 2000 and 2022.

Sweeping my cursor across Lake Mead,
I draw a curtain of time

so the water contracts
from its former blue-black coves

to the present twig of cyan
deep in a serrated basin.

Who will be the first to bottle
the last? Like the vial

of Mount Saint Helens ash that quivered
in my teenage nightstand

among Bics with prized-out safeties
and a sheaf of creased letters.

In one, I’m forgiven
for needing to “find”

myself then promised to be loved
forever. Perhaps we should seed

the clouds and force
rain back to the rivers –

act, not cede to irregular
billows of relief. Only

all these years later,
rereading her surrender

to my fleet, uncertain love,
have the tears finally come.

Nothing’s left to save,
though the foolscap drinks them up.

 

 

Optimism

A fingernail is never enough
to scrape sticky tack
from paint. It lingers

till you use more tack
and daub blue specks away.
Unmarking walls before we move,

I think how I do the same
with fear – draw it from my body
only with more fear.

It could be worse.
It could always be worse.

 

 

 

 

Neil Surkan’s most recent collection of poems is a chapbook, Ruin, from knife|fork|book. He is also the author of Unbecoming, Their Queer Tenderness, On High, and Super, Natural. neilsurkan.com