Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean water broken
Before God’s last put out the light was spoken.
“Once by the Pacific” – Robert Frost
As though the stars were edible
or subject to our praise….
Sleek of leaf and vegetable,
we stretched our length and raised
voices almost never heard
among our human counterparts.
They’d tilt their heads to parse our words,
they’d root about our hearts
and, squint-eyed, search our ranks – hart,
and bear, emu, dove – for untoward
sentiment, some ramparts
they must charge and hurdle.
Yet Sky charged down on us, and their razed
towns beneath the water-table
swayed, and we, the last of a line, précis
of the Word, were audible
to ourselves alone – our doubled
bleats, our howls and brays
were tittles on our shoreless tabula
rasa. Keen-eyed sharks and rays
coasted by like seraphim. Hurried
by an angry goad, Leopard
gained on Unicorn as all of Heaven whirred
like fire broken from its hearth.
And we bobbed, a cork above the Hartz
and Pyrenees – the startled wards
of a panicked state, begging pardon
for what we were not sure, a herd
of Eves and Adams, sires of our race,
in broken waters, pissed-on vetch and bales.
Sail on, sail on as though all rage, après
le déluge, weren’t bottomless and oedipal.
first published in The Yale Review
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