Matthew Kelsey
On Top of the News

This morning, after a quake
in Chile’s Maule region thrust
eight-feet waves deep into the sky,
aftershocks bottle-stopped progress.

The tremors reached beaches in Hawai’i,
Tasmania, and Ventura, California. Then,

in a master stroke of triviality,
or maybe, just, I hope, of awe,
the US government extended its watch

to Antarctica. Imagine the sallow
iceblink sky, black lacquer waves,
and the flights of ice all crashing
together to sea, with no one there
to account for the damage.

The free blocks of ice would swirl
like loosened vowels past the swollen tongue
of water, the mouth of the sea explaining the world
beyond language, beyond all measurement, so that

what we’re left with is the task
of creating misdirection, of forming
a storm of words to believe in
other than death, speech, recover.

Ode to Rialto

Fossils of trees are tossed along the black
gravel coast, the off-white teeth of roots

smiling everywhere, almost as bright
as the fog-light of noontime moons, or the lime

stones sticking through the skin of the sand
like neon bones. The nacre shells smell of salt,

are swollen, half-shut, carved from the eyes of beasts
who threw trees as if they were javelins

or fish stripped of meat and left as tall
stakes at the edge of the beach.

Wind whips water to froth, pools of foam
collect, cool off, and quiver along the shore.

This continues while we sleep: the ocean
wind unhinges waves and the waves

lick with a brine that changes boundary lines.

Frost Heave

Small stones crown the soil. Mayapple, brown
seeds of buttonbush crushed and the primrose

crimped in the yard beside the drive. Preparing to leave,
I think of you, mother, voice through which plants

catch as you recite them like an apology—
false violet, choke cherry, trembling aspen, vetch. Everything

seems vulnerable in the slush, the hobblebush,
the mess of seasons turning, as if sense

can be made from this place when put behind us, this
town we call a city, the Mohican cave long shut down,

and the falls we named ourselves after
dammed up and quiet at the foot of the mill.

Home is where the start is, only. I trust weeds
to overgrow their beds when I’m gone. I trust

in the end of things. Lovely for our names, if not
for some design, we will lose and lose again, then

become something unbecoming, unmoving, a list.
We will swear by the garden we lie beneath.

Clots of hosta, creepers, blue flags left
to surrender, crutch of silver maple, pinched

nerves of rhododendrons, mulch turned up
by the rain that starts like an engine and hisses

as it falls. Or, simply, it is raining. I am still
trying to leave. There is no perfect metaphor

for this, no word to wave off with.
No one means go when they say it.

<< return to the Table of Contents for New Series #4: Winter 2012, Volume 2 Number 2