Water Puppets by Quan Barry

Author:Quan Barry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822978312
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

—August 2009

If only I had been able to form the idea of a substance that was spiritual

after Ana Fernandez's Pins

The soul is segmented.

Even in the dark it glows, each thoracic bulb

brilliant, pastel, both primordial & futuristic.

Once I saw a pod of sperm whales sleeping

in the long night of the sea, their bodies

vertical like a forest, tails to the surface,

the massive trove of their heads

like stopped pendulums trained down straight

toward gravity. It too was a vision

of the corporeal rendered faultless.

What else is there to say? That I should have

loved more? That I should have spent

less time locked into the forms of things?

That I should have cared proportionally

about transcendence? The transfiguring?

The body sloughing off & then the melting away

through the strata back toward the whole?

Sister, what gives things their properties?

What resting place have you framed for yourself?

What sanctuary have you built?

All is a mustard seed within the sphere

of the moon, which is itself a mustard seed

within the next sphere—one inside the other

ad nauseam. The shattered godhead, the lost sparks—

O, colony of lambent souls!

All this sublimation on the head of a pin.

All this wriggling in the microscope's lens.

Then too you will rest in us just as now you work.

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