This Blue : Poems (9781466875074) by McLane Maureen N

Author:McLane, Maureen N.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466875074
Publisher: Macmillan

LEVANTO

salt lips & a buoyed band

binds the sea in loose chains

to swim in. the beach’s

thinned out, the clouds puffing

in, the last ferry’s

debarked a last load.

starting out now

seems impossible

but. the rock walls

break the breakers

in. nothing

cannot be disciplined

or freed. scant pines

stagger the apennines

semaphoring

what. quartz-

striped granite

tells a time

that outlives us.

I am older

than the sea

in me.

IV

TERRAN LIFE

—an excursion beginning with a line of William Wordsworth

When we had given our bodies to the wind

we found bones in the earth and not in the sky.

We found arrowheads in the earth and not in the sky though they’d flown through the air before grounding.

The era of common sense is over

& finished too the flourishing of horoscopes.

Hey traveler what chart to sign your way? what iPhone app?

All the birthdays have immolated themselves in a far pyre

and no one knows where

they were born.

Earth gods always come after sky gods.

If you could choose

a secret power would it be flight?—

a wish more often expressed

than the desire for invisibility.

“A mythology reflects its region”

and a poet sang the sea the lemon trees and pines

the Ligurian breeze salting his lines

and a lightly placed step on a Greek mountain is the goat song of tragedy.

Jehovah rarely shows his face for we would die of it

die as surely as those who looked to the sky in the bombing raid

the underground tunnels a sudden refuge

Out of ash I come Out of the earth

Back to ash I go He fashioned them

male and female I tell you

they wore the most beautiful evanescent clothes

in paradise so much subtler than the trawling nakedness of heaving giants

hurling other giants to heaven & some to hell

on the restored ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Thus far clones are of earth, alone.

When you say earth you mean land but more than land You mean the oceans covering “the earth” as if earth were the substrate of everything and not also the crust.

I found the ground sound, unfaulted, uncracked, even where the continents have split and will again split the archaic seamstress unable to suture the plates of the earth forever.

“Terran life”: what the biologists typically study but “weird life” is also a zone of research. “It is easy to conceive of chemical reactions that might support life involving noncarbon compounds”—

viz. The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, p. 6.

Earth now supports life but could not now initiate it.

Crawl, sway, sashay: you’re still doing it on an earth

you take for granted instead of going crazy

yr head blown off by an apple no I meant an IED no

I meant an apple.

Newtonian physics’ defunct but that doesn’t mean an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree composed of atoms whose dark matter you don’t know how to measure, supermodel. Me neither.

Gravity thy name is woman

always secretly pulling me toward you

as if I had no resistance

as if the clothes I wore were merely draped

on a mannequin as if I were merely an earthbound species with new skin

that fur an old animal’s fur

reclaimed by another.

Did you see the subtle shift from umber to somber to ochre on the walls of

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