Earth
&
seas
There I learned to say
gull fish Suzanne
even
horseshoe crab
as the creatures lay like armed disembodied heads
along the beach, waving their stranded claws.
Through those two words I learned their pain
wasn't my pain, though I couldn't stop
rolling them back to the sea .
Word
&
human
And the crabs, pinched, Silurian
moved across the face of the waters.
This was my God. Not the shelled creatures
or the sea, but the tension in the salt air,
the distance, as they slowly contracted and sank
into the algal depths, as I mourned their oblivion
the way my parents learned to mourn
mortling
&
evening
all
that we'd never understand:
hunger, and the freezing tenement in Brooklyn,
the many lives they threw away to stay together
for the sake of two strange, olive-skinned children.
I remember a look on the face, mouth set, eyes
inward, a look of anger and grief
and perserverant forgiveness,
and I knew God must have looked so
in the garden, when he finally decided the image must live,
and he took the trembling clay into his hands
so that even solitude would have a name.
