Molly Kugel Merkner
Condolences
It was a hot shower slowly going cold,you leaning against the stall while the water strokedyour skin and drew small continents on the flesh
of your gently bowed belly, as you guessedwhat they were: the sketches read like fortune cookies.The songs on the radio were merely directions,
prescriptions for old antibiotics in your stuffed cabinetnext to vitamins and your husband’s toothpicks.But they told you a tale like the ones of the night bird
arriving at the kitchen windowsill as you did the dishes,stacking the pots on a yellow towel each nightwhile the TV and the daughters clouded up
in the family room, until all you could hearwas that black bird whispering long stories.Could they lift you, could they show you
tempting locations: a garden of tree peonies,flush bowing from branches, fallen heads scatteredon a pastoral path, gracefully spilled from the stem?
Was it the dream of Japan? Didn’t you sayit couldn’t have been a memory from a book? It was more foreign than anything foreign:
usually something known, like a porch swing,was mixed with something indescribable and sudden. You’d later call it a biting draft, early in the morning.
Temporary Homes for Quahogs
You rise from a rock pool, those oases that remain once the tide rushes back to its berth,stranded by the tide or awakened from pelagic sleep and ready to traverse the uncharted.Either way, somehow forlorn, you wait and succumb to the charms of the dearth of water.Here you can see the waterline, the razor clams, whelks, cockles—and even small hands that dart
and dip, in search of an easy path into the bathyal realm.The young want a small shell to tell them, an utterance, an oracle from the depthsto remind them of what they only just slipped past like a drifting boat or a helm-less ship,déjà vu, a missed dock, the rocks they hold in their tiny hearts, saying that nothing will be kept.
Tide Pools on Orcas Island
1.Under a brief rock,stone apricot arms glow forbarnacles above.
2.Mussels cling with grief,those blue echoes listeningto the rock’s stomach.
3.Limpets mark coarse time,breathing jagged shoreline, thwartall else but high tide.
4.Far as the strandline,a mermaid’s purse found hollow,that black case, weightless.
5.Coldest, returning,she culls shell, fish, left old glass,into her vast limbs.
Molly Kugel Merkner teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado at Denver. Her poems have appeared most recently in Subtropics and Poetry East.
It was a hot shower slowly going cold,you leaning against the stall while the water strokedyour skin and drew small continents on the flesh
of your gently bowed belly, as you guessedwhat they were: the sketches read like fortune cookies.The songs on the radio were merely directions,
prescriptions for old antibiotics in your stuffed cabinetnext to vitamins and your husband’s toothpicks.But they told you a tale like the ones of the night bird
arriving at the kitchen windowsill as you did the dishes,stacking the pots on a yellow towel each nightwhile the TV and the daughters clouded up
in the family room, until all you could hearwas that black bird whispering long stories.Could they lift you, could they show you
tempting locations: a garden of tree peonies,flush bowing from branches, fallen heads scatteredon a pastoral path, gracefully spilled from the stem?
Was it the dream of Japan? Didn’t you sayit couldn’t have been a memory from a book? It was more foreign than anything foreign:
usually something known, like a porch swing,was mixed with something indescribable and sudden. You’d later call it a biting draft, early in the morning.
Temporary Homes for Quahogs
You rise from a rock pool, those oases that remain once the tide rushes back to its berth,stranded by the tide or awakened from pelagic sleep and ready to traverse the uncharted.Either way, somehow forlorn, you wait and succumb to the charms of the dearth of water.Here you can see the waterline, the razor clams, whelks, cockles—and even small hands that dart
and dip, in search of an easy path into the bathyal realm.The young want a small shell to tell them, an utterance, an oracle from the depthsto remind them of what they only just slipped past like a drifting boat or a helm-less ship,déjà vu, a missed dock, the rocks they hold in their tiny hearts, saying that nothing will be kept.
Tide Pools on Orcas Island
1.Under a brief rock,stone apricot arms glow forbarnacles above.
2.Mussels cling with grief,those blue echoes listeningto the rock’s stomach.
3.Limpets mark coarse time,breathing jagged shoreline, thwartall else but high tide.
4.Far as the strandline,a mermaid’s purse found hollow,that black case, weightless.
5.Coldest, returning,she culls shell, fish, left old glass,into her vast limbs.
Molly Kugel Merkner teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado at Denver. Her poems have appeared most recently in Subtropics and Poetry East.