Two poems, by Stephen Brockwell

 

Lost Tongues
for Pearl Pirie

It was as if our tongues
escaped the compound
and ran off by themselves
to the riverbank.

Words dropped like spit
into the river
never forming thoughts
that might save us from ourselves.

I could not tell you
I love you; the air
would not hold
the sound of the words.

I could not hear you;
I am no lip reader
and you were wading
downstream in the current.

We had never borne witness 
to such quiet—not silence:
it was as if the wind had chosen
to carry other sounds, not ours.

Our agreement with the air—
ephemeral glyphs
traced by a fingertip
on infant skin,

sung to a dozing child—
had been forgotten;
the pact expired
after generations

failed to remind us of it.
No one whispered, “Oh, Sam,
before I go, don’t forget
your obligation to the air.” 

It was as if the larynx,
loom of the voice,
had lost the warp
of the air.

Even in a storm
I could have brought
my mouth
close to your ear,

cupped my hands,
and spoken over the gusts.
I kneel on riverbed gravel.
I am a clay tablet

for the grief of the air
inscribed on my knees
in the cuneiform
of wind-scattered pebbles.

 

Shade Lakes


Late September sunsets
in the shade lakes in the valleys
of the Colorado Rockies
hold liquid depths of absent light.

Steel crustaceans glint
as they dine on sediment, soil,
stone, ore, and trees
the way a king crab

samples the seabed for barnacles
and sunlight from the surface
reflects from its opening
and closing mandibles.

As we fly toward Denver,
shadows evaporate
into a plain of late fall
sunlight. Boulder houses,

revealed by window
reflections, emerge
on a plateau that was once
an ancient seabed.

See the fossils
of our future remains:
earth-throats of rare
earth mineshafts,

sclerotic vasculature
of superhighways,
skeletal concrete towers,
human coral we

recolonize every morning.
What will future species
make of the pacemaker
they recover from the calcium

birdcage where my lungs
and heart coordinated
the supply chain
of my light-devouring eyes?

“Nothing, darling,”
a nearby passenger sighs,
responding to a question
asked by someone else,

words at least one of us
utters every moment,
somewhere, in a multitude
of tongues, answering

a private question a spouse
whispers because nothing
is what we make of it all
and will be made of all of this.

Stephen Brockwell is an Ottawa poet. His book All of Us Reticent Here Together won the Archibald Lampman award in 2017. He is a software development director at the Environmental Systems Research Institute.