LAGUNA WITH FISH
Before
the Christian Fish was caught
marshes flourished, wild game gamboled in the bracken, cornfields,
melons, apple and apricot orchards were lovingly tended--then
Ichthyos was hoisted, staring down at malignant ponds
praying to be spawned.
A
garden is an island, a fish-baiting
man is a man-eating fish, a deep hole a quarry filled to the
brim with spirited tides of hierophanies or acres
of pits and underground mines, earth turned inside out,
hauled up, refined.
Caught
in the combers of a May wind, arching fishtails celebrate boys who
survived the edges of growing up to this point hooked to a post,
anguished fins beating against
invisible currents, with baskets and bulging eyes.
What's
become of
History's carping voices?
Bone dry. |
We drink the ruins as if elixir
whispering to children in Mother's
cloaked lap, adding stories to stories, ancestral remains
flower from the depths, a discrete
blooming drowned in devotions deeper than ourselves, this world
keeps bobbing up groundless, each sallow
corpse replacing its elder.
