Kathleen Hellen
pieta

…arching her back…clutching its tail in her mouth. – CNN

Near Orca Island, off the coast
of old-growth forest, the sea entangles

with the clouds—she wears no veil, the calf
bears no resistance carried on her saddle.
See her fin in tour of grief? hear the “talking”
to her pod? The dead calf coddled
on her forehead, nudged to surface
over weeks, hundreds of kilometers.

I feel fatigue…numbness that’s familiar…loss
of appetite, loss of sleep … bewilderment gathering
in peaks and depressions. The undulating waves of scattered
observations. Complexities I mediate through visual
perception, through myth—as in the dream

in which the sheets of gentle draping flowing
down her arms, to the bottom of her robes,
mask how she enlarged in proportion to great weight.
The true fullness of abandonment
that changed her. The isolation.

If I dream closely, lucidly
I see her broken nose, the broken fingers.

horseandrider one

first seeing
the forest-beast evolved
in first-flush pink
embarrassment of spring
I had a hunch
roused by drunkenness
that’s jovial—o
the tavern turned to laps
and how he bucked
how he pushed to stall
his hairy chin stuck out—o
the not behaving
I had a crush
how asinine
to figure in the mount
the ecstasy like taking off

<< return to the Table of Contents for New Series #8: Winter 2019, Volume 4 Number 2