The Final "P"

Packing. So far I've crammed way too much everywhere--tank tops and books are a must, but I've still got too many. Likely I'll need one of each, but how do you choose one top or one book? Yeah. I've got the complete sonnets of Shakespeare, some Keats & Dickinson, Eliot and (for good measure) Plath. Maybe I'll throw in Sexton. Maybe Gilbert. We'll see. I got my Gjertrud Schnackenberg, but I think I'll wait w/her...maybe. And The White Goddess. Or I could just bring those two? Zoiks.

In any case, I'm operating as if all is well in the world, and perhaps it will then be. I woke up and hit VerseDaily like I usually do over the morning (before 7am) mocha, and here's what I found (I even read it a second time, aloud) by George David Clark (from the Southern Poetry Review)

Jellyfish

The dark sea dreams them.
They are the inexchangeable
currency of dreams,

the interest the other world
pays and pays into this one.
In the blueing pre-dawn

they seem hewn out
from the littoral like great,
waterlogged diamonds,

an interior gleam.
Who speaks for them
speaks for the secret

side of the womb
for they are the long-tasseled
death-bonnets of children

we conceive but never
bring to term. And so we love
and jointly curse them.

It is impossible
to tell if they reach for us
or we for them,

so strange is their delicate
gravity: They are sisters
to the moon then, and pulse

in her wake, a curdled
blooming of echoes
as she too is an echo.

But in the fluorescent pink
and green pockets
of their bodies, softer

than night, they're smuggling
rumors of those suns we fail
to imagine. They hold whole

oceans beneath their umbrellas.
Tell me, friend, is there an end
to revelation? The poison

flowers blossom inside me
like colored Rorschachs
I might come to believe in.

Evening and thunderheads
in the austral sky, the jellyfish
tides, an exhibition

of lightnings. Scaled-down
Hiroshimas of the deep,
they flare in the mind,

their cold medusa-bells
resounding, calling us back
to the black sands of sleep.


(and who doesn't love all those tercets, right?...goodness)

There's so much here to adore, but "the long-tasseled death-bonnets of children we conceive but never bring to term" is one of those lines I'm so angry that I didn't write.

In any case, I'm off to prepare for PR, to check on a (hopefully) recovering boy, and all else. Tell me what you think about this poem, and I'll see you soon.

Oh, and an interesting fact before I go: the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean (the Milwaukee Depth) lies w/in the Puerto Rican trench at a depth of 27,493 feet.

Wow.