Someday As a Scroll
The crown of all creation is lost upon earth’s blue head,
and the theatre is too large to see Ophelia’s loss,
The casket of the wilderness has housed too many dead
to turn a tear dripped eyeball onto one of tiny cost.
To the dark wings of the ocean her little corpse is pulled
by the undertow of sweat and tears of this gigantic world
Her silken hair floats listlessly, her open hand lies limp,
unmoored from all her stories, her dreams and her laments.
But she beautiful, decaying, floats there her Lover’s scroll,
the sealed and waiting promise of a day as yet untold
when fat and nerves and bones unfurl and cast off chastity
and her nameless body is given a name, even larger than the sea.
A couple years ago in a poetry class the professor had us sit in front of a work of art for forty-five minutes in order to take it in and really listen before responding to it. (a great exercise by the way!) I sat in front of a picture entitled Untitled #33. It was a giant photograph of the ocean from above and in the corner was a woman floating. It kind of looked like she was on vacation, but the series was done using the specific body contortions of people jumping out of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Part of the theme explored the vastness of the natural world and how small our pleasure or suffering was in comparison, indistinguishable from hundreds of feet in the air. My professor liked the first two lines and said the rest was...eh.....This is how I originally turned it in.
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