Claudia K. Grinnell

 

Need

And the temple imitates the mountain's shape, intensifies it, clarifies
it, geometricizes it, and therefore makes it more potent, as if to draw
water down from the mountain to the fields below.

                                Vincent Scully, describing Teotihuacan,
                                a ceremonial site of pre-Columbian America

I need to do one thing
and do it very well, maybe
peel an apple, name a color
labial? because pink won't
do, and besides I delivered
my first child with a bayonet,

the holy American seed, covered
in blood. Make me more
potent, it hissed. Light steals
my memory, erases the image
of the ship's powerful oars
the precise geometry of the jib,

Lacerta (constellation
in the Milky Way,
between Cygnus and Andromeda)--
I look up and the sun burns
out my eyes. Now: the axe.
The splitting

of wood and bone--
laceratus, lacerare.
If it's sacrifice you're after
you've come to the right place.
What you hear now is not
the scream, what you see

now, is not, is not at all, nothing
but the afterbirth of a particularly fertile cunt.

 

It's Never Too Late To Quit

                 Yes, we have no bananas …

Yes, this is chaos: a fish
presented as dinner.
Its eye appears overcooked.
A minute ago, it still
flickered, lidless. Now
skins remains and two
inches of bone.
The cook scrapes the pot
clean of butter and fins,
begins another meal.
Suddenly even a handful
of seaweed gains importance:
a drifting mess at the shore,
something we can't talk
about (despite its importance).
Neutrality, yes, that's what
we want now-that
and a clean kitchen.
And then, of course, fate
intervenes: the phone rings.
It's for us. A stranger
on 5th Avenue picked up
a quarter and gave it
to the squeegee man
who in turn left it
at the counter of an all-
night convenience store-
and now someone wants
to talk to us. About fish.

 

Dynamics of Fluids in Porous Media

I.
The water was gray,
so was the sky.

II.
Clouds dragged,
fish hung suspended.

III.
Above all: the sun
waited to enter and mutter meaningless lines.

IV.
Below all: the whale
dredged the bay's bottom.

V.
The current, sloshing
black-green sea weed to shore and back.

VI.
Motion, coming and going-
twisting and untwisting and twisting . . .

VII.
Again. One gray bird
flies across the water.

 

Woman Walking Across a Bridge

I.
There
she is.

II.
The hot sun, nothing
more than
something
that makes a shape.

III.
The woman, too,
reflects light
going forever
across a bridge.

IV.
She is leaving,
has already
gone, her hands
are empty.

V.
The bridge holds her
up: above gravity
she will become
color, the color
of legs walking.

VI.
This is how
light enters dark:
as desire.

VII.
She is forever
arriving in the light
of her body.

 

The Remedy Ahead of the Pain

Somebody's always standing in a doorway,
smoking. Somebody's always throwing a cat
into the forest, expecting to hear laughter.
Somebody does not see it clearly yet

but the river is rising. The levy, swollen,
fat like a thigh, will yield. There will be water,
making no shape, obliterating all shapes, a mouth
sounding all sounds. Even the sky will be

water. I made my bed, I don't lie
in it anymore. The long holy arrival of water
announcing itself as damp, not thunder--
In penance, I peel bark from the branch:

the wound glistens. I am ready, I say,
I am ready to be temporarily useful.

 

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