Donna Lewis Cowan
Winter Melt 2009
The Siren
1.
And for each passing ship
the same song: a soulless
bare-breasted chorus line,
the blank verse braiding us in.
I lip-synch as you gather,
your hands tamping the ship rails
like hooves striking dust, catcalling,
applauding women who are children,
whose curiosity is never silent.
I would tell you: look at these rocks,
how the waves groom them
but leave the edges sharp,
how water trembles toward us
but shrinks away. Listen:
water peels a man's skin
like yellowed paper – you,
the quiet one, hear it and say nothing.
You are kindling for gods, dearest.
2.
I once sang. Once a man crawled close,
more blood than body, to tell me
I sounded like a cat in heat;
his palms snagged on the rocks
as he slid away. The boat's cabin
shuddered like an egg-sac in a storm.
I felt my voice empty into the salty air,
blend into the sea like rain –
diminuendo…then nothing.
The sea drew close,
lapped out its silences,
divinities,
bones.
3.
Already the sea
is trying to forget: it recedes
like a potion used, corked,
and put away again.
Without love, life flows from you
like guttered rain. Why else
would these rocks lie blanketed
by so many outstretched hands?
Is it only your map –
that innocent geometry
of stars –
that will not fail you?
Children
In my basket they lay sober,
unlit: the unwinding scrolls
of newly-wired fuses.
I plant them in rows, grooming
the soil about the wooden embryos.
Surveyors of a broken sun,
they hum like untuned metal strings.
*
Spring, and their bodies snap
like sprung traps.
They hail revolution in the grass,
leaves lapping into dizzy,
strumming arms. Wide-eyed,
they swell hearts like wings.
*
It was a proud, metal winter,
stinging early March with stiff winds
and drunken rips of rain.
The farmers set out torches
to keep the groves from freezing.
We grazed our fingers
over your burrowing hoods,
pressing petals into their crowns,
warming you until the sun could.
*
Spring, and I watch you from my chair,
streaming electric, gathering gravity
around you like permanent planets.
I imagine the thread of your roots
wrapping this garden up tight -
each segment in the darkness
a maze
of one world finding another.
