You Must Be Ready

Soda Dam, New Mexico

—Photo by Cynthia Linville, Sacramento

SCHOOLS OF LITTLE FISH

falling in snow beyond the window,

in bread breaking in cracks cut by steam,

because you can't snap your fingers and hold a pencil

even if today you are the best poet in the house.

No one, no one is around to see you stamp on your brain.

No one can swear that the loaf was whole to begin with

when the invisible knife that remained in the ashes

sliced through the bread no longer in the oven.

How do these things happen?  How do fish

enter the flakes of the snow?  How do raindrops

house all the components of a man or a woman?
No one knows, no one is small enough to see it.

I live in a nation that can saw into the Yukon,

that owns the art to rescue whales and wolves

but is helpless before the rat that lives in the street

among the homeless, and cannot bring itself

to leave Central America.  It has learned the lesson

of the schools of little fish, and its armies travel

in raindrops, in the empty chambers of white bread,

in steam opaquing the pane of a window in winter.

Because no one can hold a pencil and snap his fingers,

there are no records, just misprints in the papers

and smudges in the crowd on photographs where

there was trouble.  View the photo the day of repression.

And what will you say of it?  Here is the flat photo.
The image lies in a thin layer of emulsion.

If you write on it, the picture rubs off.  If you tell,

it is thin words, blood carried by abstract breezes.

You must try to absorb the barbed wire left behind

now used to hang laundry, the tank and propeller

and other trophies of war—extra rice, extra beans.

Even if today you are the best poet around,

you must first invite the barbs to penetrate your skin,

there to wring their wire roses in your blood.

And you must wait until the propeller begins to spin

its way into your skull, clearing the chambers as it turns.

And you must wait for the little tanks to start up

in the ghostly shape of lead gasses rising.  Not ready

when needed, now you must not come all the way home

until you can carry your brains in your open hands. 

—Marvin Bell

________________________

—Medusa