When you are by the sea on an island made mostly of cement
When in the morning there are no mourning doves susurrating in the strangler figs
No grackles raucously settling down in palm crowns at nightfall
When a brown anole fans its red dewlap defending its territory of pavers
And another crawls out from under a pile of moldering Brazilian Beauty Leaf leaves,
a greasy black tail sprout growing from its broken stub
When a cormorant dives for young snook in the bay then comes up empty-beaked,
trembles on a rusty culvert to spread and dry its ceremonious wings
Where the mangrove forest is no longer a forest no longer an oyster grove,
your raft no longer banked in its dense cabled roots
Because some days you feel incremental disaster in each second,
which inflames the mind like grit in an eye
Because on these days, you are like a tongue cut from a mouth
Because on these days you know you will never be empty enough
You lie on the hot brick patio and sweat, your weighty limbs soften into the sinking mortar
You stare and stare at a blistering sky
When finally, having reached the very bottom, that place where self-absorption is flawless
There springs a wondrous moment, like a trap that has unhinged:
And you feel a slight coil of return— a slight lifting
Which you recognize as your species’ uncanny ability to imagine buoyancy,
where there isn’t any,
As if this will cure one failure of the self after another.
This poem first appeared in Lana Turner.
—
Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laureate Fellow. Her third collection of poems, There are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral will be published in 2025 by Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. Her previous book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize (FVE/Parlor Press, 2019) and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. She is the reviews editor for the online literary journal Terrain.org
.
