The Thrashing Ground
Sometimes I’m the wheat, sometimes the chaff
the wind blows light and away, toward the sea.
Mostly, I’m the thrasher, the one separating me
from not me, never sure who I am in the great rush,
drop, lift and look again to see what remains.
Now I walk across the back deck, ear to the phone,
feet pacing slowly because of the nail heads lifted
from boards no matter how often we hammer them back in.
I am listening to you thrash. I am remembering
how I thrash, am thrashed, was thrashed, fighting
all elbows and hard vowels against the stone
of reality, which is the rock of the earth.
I do not know how to not do this when I am doing it.
I do not know how to tell you the same but I try
because that’s what humans do.
A crowd of cardinals fight mid-air. The humidity
roils up another thunderhead that may or may not
produce the rain we need so much. The whole world
us included, up against gravity and entropy,
until we fall to the ground beneath the weather of words.
.
What Is Home to an Eel?
There’s a story of a boy in Sweden
putting an eel in a well long ago.
When the TV cameras came, they found
a 150-year-old eel with enormous eyes
from swimming in a small circle of dark.
What is time to an eel, who comes from
the Sargasso Sea, like all eels, but then changes
size and shape into glass eels leaning into the currents
of the continental shelf where the water is no longer
stagnant dark blue but rushing turquoise and mirror
until they can ride the tidal stream up estuaries
changing bodies as they go to elver, then yellow eels.
What is memory at all to this snake of a fish, this slippery
curving line that can live for dozens of years now as
a freshwater breather and mover between the banks
of the Raritan River in New Jersey or even all the way
to Lake Ontario, rushing against the tides until
they go back to the Sargasso sea, hundreds of miles,
millions of eels, to return to a place of no place
mapped by no shores or the speed of the trade winds,
just the Sargassum grass above them as they grow
pectoral fins and larger eyes, turn their bodies silver,
and even, in their last year, develop sexual organs
(we still don’t know how they mate) to leave behind
a new cycle of eels star-prone all directions
from where ships got stuck for weeks because
of the stillness of the Horse Latitudes.
What is home to an eel? Is it only and always
in the deepest dark where they can swim forever?
.
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 24 books, including How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems; Miriam’s Well, a novel; The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body. Founder of Transformative Language Arts, she is a beloved writing workshop facilitator and writing coach. She loves life-giving collaborations: she offers YourRightLivelihood.com with Kathryn Lorenzen, Bravevoice.com with Kelley Hunt, and TheArtofFacilitation.net with Joy Roulier Sawyer. She offers weekly “Write Where You Are: A Writer’s Companion” through her Patreon page and her blog, “Everyday Magic” at CarynMirriamGoldberg.com.
.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 