after Oliver Wendell Holmes
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| Image source: Carnivoraforum |
This is the ship of state
swimming backwards through a grimy sea
spewing foam, its hundred sticky arms
waving wild and pale and aimlessly.
Chamber after chamber fills and closes
blocking out what’s gone before.
No contamination can leak out –
thoughts sealed inside appear no more.
Adding empty gap to empty gap
the hulk is finally cast up on the beach,
where we toss it back and forth, and ask
what kind of truth had one time grown beneath.
Mary Cresswell is from Los Angeles and lives on New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast. Her third book, Trace Fossils, came out in 2011.