Solar Eclipse via Leaves in a Parking Lot
This is an excerpt from a longer poem called, “Political Expansion in Ancient Cultures,” which was supposed to be slightly funny, as if I were writing a comparative thesis, but really it’s a poem about respiration and loneliness. I will say that one of the good things that came from nursing school (in addition to a degree and a career) was all of the amazing things I learned about the human body and modern medicine.
from Political Expansion in Ancient Cultures
Just for company I leave the faucet
running; even the perceived corrections
afloat in the atmosphere,
no, they do not comfort me. My brother and I
just seven and ten when we realized the creek
below the pine woods was dead.
Two crayfish and only two all those long years
and the neighbor’s oldest boy growling at us
from the weeds, his heart a crumbling
passage in an onion-domed church
or castle. His two lungs two old men, high priests,
matched branches of dried kelp. Now my daughter
with her open face like a scallop shell; I look at her
and feel the craquilature begin
within my own breast
and fin.
