Blair O'Gorman
Blessing one's Self

Not quite a stigmata, my palms turned dry,
A smoking leaf pile not choked out.
The bones flamed inside, ignited the nerve.

It continued for weeks after the first pang
Recoiled my arm after the mower's cord,
A sharp snap, the yard spigot's waters

Cooling to a degree but not completely
It continued and I distanced my hands
From those I loved; my children, my wife.

Each object was kindling. Thin fingers
Charred bone-bare in my grasp;
My son's curls, minute stove cols.

But I learned. Before, I clubfisted
My way through love, brotherhood.
Now I must keep at least a finger's distance.

I do this, holding life as a violinist
Holds his bow; anchored fingertips,
Canopied palm, airy space beneath.

Now the music comes. The bow a songbird's
Hollow bone, the horsehair plucked and strung
Without revolt. I sense what was insensible.

I take the body on the tongue, now.
After I send a thanksgiving prayer,
I step aside with the sign of the cross.

An Education

The face hangs from a fat hook
slung off a scale bearing boom;
the frantic gasping now subsided,
the lips and fins drool
down to the caving bulkhead.

T saw the photograph in the paper.
The fish weighed in at 220 pounds,
the largest grouper in decades.
It was older than me, no doubt,
had been lurking deep for longer
than we could remember, had we known.

The picture's bottom left
showed a pair of tossed rubber boots,
beside them stood a boy, barefoot,
captioned as the fisher's son.
But his small feet would've been lost
in those men's boots.

Those, I know, were his father's.
At the grunt of the fish's first tug,
they had skidded deckwise, heart stopped,
footing slick and uncertain. The line
tight as thought fought its harbor.

So, the connection was made real.
The gray energy shook, the slammed,
then fell to. Gave in. The umbilical
mistake caught his lip like a slipped word.
The harvester's brow and back salt drenched,
the sea turned inside out.

Having woken the hermit from its womb,
woken to the upper world's metal,
the makeshift dreams of thin air,
the boy ran the deck barefoot yelling.
his father being caught on the line.

Oyster Shuckers

I only had to dump and wash them,
fifty pounds at a time in bellies
of burlap. Sure, the soft of my forearms
was chewed by the plunging calcium razors,
and occasionally a finger suffered a gash.
But I could get along with these pains.

The oyster shuckers, they suffered.
Their hands gnawed by the bivalve gears,
held gloveless, tagged cigarettes and spoke
as I hosed down their word. I couldn't listen.
I was caught by their calendared hands,
each day marked by a scarred divot or wedge.
The growing oysters had accrued corner blades,
then imprinted their rutty faces on the hands.
It was time telling in turn. Immortality.
Almost. The oysters still died, exposed,
on ice. We survived. The hands' fates
undetermined.

Back to Issue 2, 1999