Poems from Kathleen's collaboration
with visual artist, Maggie Citrin
of Vancouver, British Colombia, around the theme of water.
Mother at the Seashore
Beneath the sun that makes us near
transparent,
I see your hair white,
your skin grown paler, too,
the edges of your body fading first.
The children snake around
my legs. Each time I approach you,
Mother, I'm anchored
to their need.
You turn your face from me
at last: a mother tethered
to her daughter until the knot
grows slack and leaves a daughter
tethered to her children in return.
I'm not the heart's ease
you thought you had stored up.
You study seaweed tangling
the ocean floor. Now I'm the one
to let you go
into the stirring waters.
SELKIE
When I first came to land
I thought I cried the salt out like a sea turtle,
but my husband licks it
from my breasts at night.
Landlocked childbirth confused me.
My husband ran down the shoreline
shouting, snatched
the infant from its salty broth.
But even after that, he wouldn't
let me go. My muscles sensed
the sealskin bunched in some dark place.
I searched and searched.
In spring and autumn
when he oils it, my human skin
grows soft and full. At night I wake
alone and feel the swelling, but as I rise
to catch him at it, I hear the latch,
his shadow in the doorway.
What is this love that let him
take me like an oyster from its bed?
At dusk I walk to the farthest rock.
Surrounded by water, I sit and hear
my sisters call. I see the sleek forms
of my sea children diving into waves,
pulling me to them like a tide. I want
the animal ocean, grey flanks
heaving liquid as a snake, solid
as silk parting the air.
The muscles
in my back and stomach arching
for a dive. The salt is in my
mouth now.
I long to sing again, but my own voice frightens me.
BARRIER ISLAND
Here the sea breeze fans the land,
warms the water, pulls in jellyfish--
bubbles trailing poison.
The wind shifts. The land breeze
carries pollen scattering the ashes
of scorched cornfields as it passes,
dropping grasshoppers
When we walk the beach for relief,
we find them stranded on the shoreline,
their green wings useless with seaspray.
Foam scuds across the road.
Salt spray licks paint off cars.
At night we build a barricade with books and chairs
but still a strong wind slams the bedroom door
waking us to storms that swallow coastlines.
The air is heavy with stories that
salt carries:
cargo sunk off Bermuda and Beirut,
deep-sea rays who hunt on stilts
as they prowl the muddy bottom,
the angler fish, its pole and line
grown out above its mouth, for bait
a piece of glowing flesh.
Journey with My Sister
Naked, except for our waterproof
backpacks
we swam the winding river. At noon
we’d climb onto the bank and drip,
spread a blanket, picnic. Our flesh
puckered, our long hair tangled
like the roots of water lilies. By mid-month
we moved awkwardly on land.
One night my sister confessed
her true objective: to move backward
into water. She enticed me with the weightlessness,
the huge expanse of our sea life.
By the time we reached the ocean,
her metamorphosis, at least, was complete.
She celebrated in her new voice while,
envious, I waved and clutched the pack she no longer needed,
watched her smooth gray back speeding
like a ribbon from the shore.
Machias Seal Island
Try not to point. Don't move,
the Captain says,
and brings the dinghy closer to the shore
where auks nest. Puffins bob beside us
or fly like little wind-up toys,
wings working hard.
The seal skins the monkfish alive
as if peeling off a surgical glove,
then dives for it again,
diving and biting,
till nothing is left but the head —
and then that's gone.
What is it that I've brought my children
here to find?
The creatures with whom we share the world?
Or for what I'd name silence, solitude,
though the air is loud with cries,
rocks thick with life?
Because we have no God
before whom to feel small,
perhaps I bring them here.
The absence of the human is the closest
I can come to understanding
what will empty me,
vast gray horizon broken by one rocky island. |
