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.

 

Kevin Varrone : How to Count to Ten

 

 

 

 

How to Count to Ten is a spin-off. A companion. For a number of years, I have been writing and editing a book-length group of poems called The Collected Letters, about the individual letters of the English alphabet (inspired by watching my three kids, all two years apart, wrangle with various stages of language acquisition). As a way to divert my attention from a number of impasses while writing that book, I decided to write a much shorter bunch of poems about the numbers 1 to 10. At the time I was reading a lot of counting books with my kids; Margaret Wise Brown’s The Important Book was also in heavy rotation; and I was reading (and regularly teaching) Erín Moure’s wonderful poem sequence “Homages to Water.”

Wise Brown’s book is simultaneously straightforward and strange, full of sentences such as, “The important thing about a daisy is that it is white” but also lovely and unexpected things like “it [a daisy] has a ticklish smell”; Moure’s poems attach surprising, compelling qualities to humble things like beets, onions, and cabbages (for example: “In the onion, there’s/something of fire. That fire known as/Fog. The onion is the way/fog has of entering the earth”). I just love that––and the idea of far-reaching associations, the impractical leaps of mind that poems seem best able to coax us to make.

I decided to borrow Wise Brown’s refrain directly from The Important Book, because I found that it worked really well for me as a generative device: as a way to start each poem, to ground it, to be a ready-made foundation from which I could then (hopefully) attempt some of the kinds of leaps I mentioned above–-to make a small, impractical counting book for grown-ups.

 

 

 

 

 

Kevin Varrone is the author of three full-length collections of poetry and numerous chapbooks. He lives outside Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University.