Excerpts

IN A LAND WHERE EVERYTHING IS TRYING TO KILL ME, I CONSIDER LETTING IT All I would need to do is stand for too long beneath its jagged, capable shadow.   All I would have to do is let my skin absorb that shade until my blood runs at 94 degrees.   Hypothermia is so much warmer than I thought. The confusion begins here,   the mingling. Every time I walk beneath a tree, more of me tangles with the breeze that lifts   its leaves, which are always 70 degrees, regardless of geography. It would be so easy, listening   to this flash inside my brain, this fact that takes up no more space than the open mouth   of a stoma. 50 microns. Half the width of a neuron. It would be so easy, the sharpened   blade sliding like wind through whatever comes within range. I snap my mind away   like a sleeve from an open flame, but the thought will finish what it started. It will home   like salmon, or whales tracing the aura of a continent. Like a missile. The wire   has been tripped, the fluids in my ear have risen into waves by the alarm. How long   have I been standing here. Who is the woman lying in the shade. *** M   M is for murmur and mutter--the ambiguity of the mobius strip, the marsh, the maybe trembling between two membranes. M is for mother, dark matter, the matrix that cradles the muscadine, marble, monosyllable, moon. Be menagerie, multivocal, madrigal. I carry your multitudes through midsummer, through marigolds and mayapples, through mud. I hide you in the middle of a maze, bury you like minerals in the mine of my body. You are marrow-deep, marine, mollusk in your mother of pearl hull. The months are a moat between you and melancholy, missiles, mourning. M is for the meteor magnifying through the telescope's lens, the metronome unmuffling. M is for metamorphosis and mutant. I am more and more mountainous. I am a mare rolling in a midnight meadow, all musk and muzzle. M is for the migrations of monarchs, mule deer, mullet, for magnetic fields, for the way the world pulls you from me and you materialize. You are motor turned music, machine turned mortal. I am mended and marooned somewhere between mist and milk. I molt, am mangled. I molt, am myself. *** THE FUTURE   The body is lined with it, like a nest, like the down the eider plucks from her breast   until her nest is a gray mist weighed down by five sea-green eggs. At the end of each season,   only one duckling will survive to fly away. This is an average. On any given day,   all of the eggs may hatch, all of the hatchlings may freeze. The gulls may cruise in rings   above the nesting colonies, the polar bear may not surge ashore. The female eider   can lay eggs for eighteen years, more or less. Without wanting to, I do the math. She will lose   seventy-two chicks before she dies, those numbers traded against her own long years by nature's   calm calculus. There is only so much life to go around. It isn't like a flame, whose belief   in itself is enough to burn a forest down. Instead, we have been given one   bolt of cloth to be shared. The choice is in how you shear it. I say "choice"   but of course it's not. It's a vast, organic machine running like static behind everything; the gene   doesn't want anything, doesn't want, doesn't exist except by cosmic mistake. Accident   means to move toward a fall . And so they fall and fall through time, carelessly, like a carnival   ride whose switch is stuck in the "on" position. I would like to die before losing any children.   In fact, there is no reason for me to be alive anymore. Having borne my code into the future,   even if only by another lifetime, I could not matter less. Eider ducklings enter the water   motherless, will dive for mussels on their own just one day after hatching. If they escape starvation,   the gulls, the cold, when will the dying begin? When do the cells start to multiply or weaken?   The eider's scientific name is somateria mollisima : the softest body. My own is already less terra firma   and more open water, more unmooring, more losing. I may have already begun to rupture   invisibly, my cells may have already begun their unwinding. Time picks us up then sets us down   a little further on, pulses through us like a wave. Sometimes it seems as if the eggs survive   just to keep the nest from blowing away. I have stayed, even though it makes me prey   to worse things than freezing wind or gulls. I am mostly glad we are not wild animals.   I am mostly glad about most things, even the future, even though I know that broken   shells may float on its waters. I need to think that the eider doesn't grieve the breaking. *** XYZ   The year yellows. The yolk of yesterday's sun lazes in the yard, piled beside the yew and yarrow, the zucchini vine that never flowered, the waxy zenobia. It sprawls like yarn, a yawn that won't be swallowed back into summer's mouth. I am zombie-eyed, zephyr-minded, would sleep until the next equinox if I could, would relax my heart until it stopped. The cold rises through the thorax and into the larynx. The autumn haze is heavy and thick as a smashed yam. Through it, pollen floats like yeast. It is hard to follow the wren's pitch and yaw, its yammering. Yearling, heir of my X, you are full of the reflex to live. I am hexed, cannot be coaxed to thrive. Zygote means yoke , the zipping of two bodies together, the axes on which are plotted a galaxy of Xs and Ys. Somewhere in that matrix is your syntax of chromosomes. You are a black box, a maze of invisible zigzags, beyond exegesis. The toadflax freezes from radix to apex. The ilex is evergreen but untouchable, the fuzz of some animal transfixed in its thorns. I think about extinction, the unidirectional vortex of time, read all the obsolete entries of the dictionary: the codex ywrit in lampe blacke; the yale ykoweryn by phlox up to its helixed horns; whelps ydreynt; the mouse in grasse by the fox ylaid; the phoenix from its sooty nest yborn ad infitium. I don't care for eternity, its violence boxed and distributed into months. I don't care for the zodiac, twisting back on itself like a zero. It only reminds me that your star is not fixed, that no stars are, that all measurements--azimuth to zenith--measure only emptiness. Even the sphinx knew that time is the most vexing puzzle. I envy the zebra distributing its name endlessly among the zebrafish, the zebra mussel, the zebra finch. Back in the garden, the drizzle glazes into ice. A bronzed apple thuds, a broken yo-yo. I cannot say no . I allow myself to be yanked back up, exhausted. Seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it. By yes, by you. Excerpted from Meltwater: Poems by Claire Wahmanholm All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.