Elizabeth Bradfield

Diatoms

****To reach that island, you have flown above
**********every thing marine, the plane’s smooth shadow
darkening further for a moment
****habitats of tuna and kelp,
**coccoliths and diatoms.  Inside the metal

*****hull you did not think of this, but of
********the frost-sharp ground of spring
*****************that every year you’ve walked too early,
******trowel in hand, to turn ground
**for the absent sun.  Later, you’d complain
**********of lacework cut by slugs,
*******then roam the garden nights, miner’s helmet

****showing a narrow path as you bend low,
**************pause, gurgle beer into a bowl
******set level in the ground.
Some days I’d kneel beside you,

**************gloves slivering my fingers, nod vaguely
****at color, the general shape of petal or leaf.  And sometimes
**you’ve listened to me go on
******about the habits of abyssal acorn worms
***********or cycles of anadromous fishes.  You

******are without a garden now, and by any clock
**************your flight has landed, you

****************have left the plane into a foreign air.  But
****I have not heard the phone’s trans-Pacific lag, or read
*****your description of this other land,
************so I keep you
**on the plane, focus on what’s familiar—the
flip-down tray, cut of seat belt at your hips,
*********ocean gyres circling clockwise below.

******Imagine
*************that white dust you buy to ring
*******the base of every tender garden stem, the diatomaceous
earth that sifts like talc through our hands
*********************and cuts pests like broken glass, it is not
really earth at all, but jagged skeletons
*of marine plants.  And beneath you and the plane

**************where I will imagine you until you write
*******that you have landed and provide
convincing details—beneath you and the silver body,
**************and the ocean’s silvered
**********surface, thick deserts of just
**********that earth.  Diatoms, millions
*******************of them, ooze like glaciers—
**************slow, bodies puckered

******and domed like the head
***of a sprinkler.  I imagine I can see each
microscopic one.  All that white

**shaded into grey by water-slowed light.  Your plane
******************is landing.  I know
*********by the postman coming up the walk.  You
****are speeding, just this second, low to the runway
over a final stretch of sand dollars.  Black, soft, and
******************living, tilted to catch
**************what it is they feed on.  I hear

*********the rattle of the mail box, the shift
*******and slide of paper.  Your blonde head
***************is moving into an airport, beyond,
**********a familiar paleness
*****against acres of dark.

Why the “Narrows Basscat”

In the spirit of the jackelope
and mermaid.  Lynx-eyed, white-fanged,
scales shellacked and caudal fin
flexed.  Postcard above my desk,
*********************I want to know
what your small throat would say,
what half-drunk stuff-man made you,
and what hunters he pissed off
when they came in for their trophies.
*****************************Did he chuckle
when he reached into his vat of glass cat eyes
and pulled out these?  And did his merriment last
through the filling of your odd cavity, the tiny stitching
back together, the fix of snarl, fin, whisker, ear?

He is dancing from the table, scissors glinting
in his hand.  And why not—if he
can’t find love, if he’s too odd for adoration,
if passion’s snickered at him, if, at last,
this strange creature makes real
the lonely taxidermy of his own soul.

Alluring

I.

Four pages of jigs, six of spinners.  The catalogue paper
glossy as a fish’s eye.  Wire herring traps.
Rubber squid.  Hooks dangling

from the belly of a painted shad – think crescent.
Think beckon.  Think of all
the quick and silver things in life you’d win
by any method because their losing
is untenable.

I want a dress
of lures, all feathers and tin,
bright thread and monofilament line,
hem hung with sinkers.

II.

The boats are still bringing in catch.
Stripers, haddock, blues and mackerel
slipping into the hold as gulls dizzy
the air.  We’ve cast so long
for what will feed us.  Lakebeds in Maine

are pebbled with lost weights, the stones leaching
their metal until loons, diving into the dark
muck, are sick with lead.  How I loved

the plumb, grey sinkers, unburnished in my palm,
the swivel above with its tricky clasp, the flash
as the spinner flicked down, following
yearning, as I did, for the sweet

muscle, seared in a pan
lined with pepper, the flesh opening
like the quick slit in the seam
of a woman’s skirt as she walks away,
back of her knees flashing with each step.

~~~~~~~~

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Approaching Ice (Persea, 2010), which was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books, 2008), which won the 2009 Audre Lorde Prize and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. In 2005, Bradfield founded the grassroots-distributed and guerilla-art-inspired Broadsided Press (www.broadsidedpress.org), which still runs. A former Stegner Fellow, she works as a naturalist and lives on Cape Cod.  Visit her website at www.ebradfield.com