April 3, 2007: Anywhere Else, Maggie Dietz
Anywhere Else
Maggie Dietz
How anyone is happy in this country
I don’t know. Any way you turn
there is an edge, and everyone
cocks a wind-burned hand over
the brow to look out under it.
The water flings petticoats of foam
against wolf-headed rocks, and
multicolored boats moored
among others to the weathered
pier bob dumb as soldiers.
We live on what’s beneath us.
Dark snake-like birds curl into
the water, rise like rose blooms
floated in bowls. And every day
the riven, mended nets go trolling.
A far cry from my unforgotten fields.
How is it, then, the boat lamps
and the buoy bells dislocate me?—
aching not for home, for something
I can’t name. As if I could be half-
another, as if I’ve lived someplace
I never will. Winter brought greenish
bergs to the harbor, floes composed
of further waters. And the strange
white crows here rode them.
A mustached woman poured
scalding coffee on the feet of one
to free it from the scalloped ice
night layered on the sand.
It screamed as my lost brother
does in dreams, with a creature’s
anguished hatred. Next morning,
it lay in the wheat-colored grass,
half-eaten by dogs. Here, shells
resembling army helmets wash
ashore, and cataracted eyes of horses.
The town creaks, the seaward shingles
of the dry-faced widows’ houses
loosen like teeth. A squall will snap
a mast in half clean as a bone.
Are we not shipwrecked?
The gravid sea holds nothing
for us—but how we squint out
over it, waiting for another sun,
for someone else’s blessed hour.
[Seventh line from the end — “A squall will snap”. The sound of that is so fantastic! Try it out loud, slow. And those first two lines, and how this weaves together tangible things, the seashore imagery, with bigger questions about suffering and emotion.]
A year ago: After Work, Richard Jones
Two years ago: The Sheep-Child, James Dickey
