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New Poems by Luci Shaw
Deluge
Think, if you were left behind.
A dead calm, sinister, then the first drops
and the river beginning to rise until
the tender tips of the grasses vanish, the wind,
the weeping trees, and days later
from the beach the wooden craft lifting,
buoyant with twinned animals. You listen,
as the unlikely prophet and
his raucous offspring shout
goodbye to your doom and outrage.
Then the drenching gloom. Pewter waves
stretching to every horizon with only
a far shadow mountain left of terra firma,
brine climbing your chilled limbs as
your mingled roars and tears meet the sky’s.
Maybe you thought good fishing
when it started. Now you’re the dead fish,
or will be when you’ve quit treading water
and water drowns out air and everything
is over. And under.
Life drawing
I have never posed naked
as a class analyzes my lights
and shades, the versions of flesh
variously translated as lines on paper.
The body not as I would like it —
sturdy bones and angled planes.
Instead, slackness and disproportion,
though that, too, is real
and worth the understanding.
This is how I think it would be to have
those easels circling, the artists,
charcoal in hand, studying my body
like a landscape. Their paper would become
my skin. I’d feel the soft sweep
of graphite and Conte crayon
on newsprint — so intimate, the shape
massaged by glances and guesses. Eyes intent,
following the droop of breast, the curve
of thigh, the crescents of brow and jaw,
and more — the multiple caress working
to get beyond surfaces, to discover
the soul within the structure. They’d take
my body in their eyes and fingers —
a kind of love-making. I the love object.
Into the blue
Strapped into the motorized mosquito by
the Tlingkit pilot, who, for $89 an hour, lifts us
over Petersburg with its fishing boats, its smell
of halibut, its thousand circling gulls,
we rise, and the red buoys in the channel shrink
and vanish in the ocean's burnished steel.
We are the body of a bird; in this new dimension
there is no fear to weigh us down. Below,
in Le Conte Fjord the cakes of ice float
like crumbled styrofoam in a bathtub. This
is better than 3-D: there is sound and this is life.
The layers of mountains arrange themselves
in a contour map as we tilt over the glacier itself,
a sluggish, high river of dirty blue-white.
This old snow-field, drawn down toward its destiny,
pleating itself as it turns, awaits its moment of truth,
its detonations like thunder and rifle shots. It surrenders,
calves violently, losing its identity to a clutter of
frozen gemstones large as buildings that plunge
into a bay of cobalt liquid between the great unmoving
knees of rock. The whole fjord heaves
with blue. I have run out of film. My eye is my lens.
Like a chemical, the color stains my memory.
Luci Shaw is the author of The Green Earth: Poems of Creation, Water Lines: New and Selected Poems, and many other books. She is active as a workshop and retreat leader on poetry and journal-writing, and lectures widely on topics related to the creative process. She lives in Bellingham, Washington. Learn more about Luci at her website, www.lucishaw.com.
Copyright © 2005 by Luci Shaw. All rights reserved.
This page was published in April 2005.
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