Poetry Spotlight with Ilyse Kusnetz
Sea Change
Meanwhile, at the edge of the world
sanderlings rush at the receding surf,
only to turn and flee its bubbling nets.
I track your prints across the beach
by the elfish snag your big toe leaves,
and wonder at the perfect Hebrew letters
imprinted on a green crab’s back,
as if even crustaceans believed in
Pascal’s wager. Half-buried below
the sand shelf, a shard of junonia,
speckled like an antiquarian book. And while
it’s not as if a shell cupped to the ear
could translate that ancient language the wind
keeps whittling on the sea,
you’re too far ahead for me to explain
how an excess of beauty changes
everything into everything else,
so this whelk’s spindle might be a calla lily
or a magician’s bouquet, each coiled flower
plucked from the one before it,
while this stoved-in conch you gave me
is a broken cornucopia, an offering
from yesterday’s high tide. Only to say
in words as close as possible to silence,
what we take from each other
is beyond this, and nothing
the unchanged world can hear.
Hurricane
We watched as the wind
snarled off
rows of shingles
until they fluttered
like broken birds
from the rooftop,
and rain
whipped at the house
so hard, it peeled
the paint from the boards.
Later, a wreckage of trees,
crushed masonry,
awnings torqued
from their moorings,
understanding, now
the world we know
can be split from itself
like a seam, leaving
a gap, an unraveling.