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Copyright @ 2014 by Hannah Sanghee Park. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on July 22, 2014.
Far cars, numerous.
Lullaby (by a lull)
and I pretend (I-10 as ocean).
And dream (DNA remade)
and dream. Maker
(remake me), better me
this time.
There you exist in water.
Unending sketch and erase
of waves on the sea surface.
Today, you’ll be all the words
I wanted to say: look, they’re so
pretty in that second they
surface. You almost didn’t
see them. You didn’t see them.
Sinuous, so commitment’s
a strange shape to hold and take.
I loved the water of you, the snake of
you, everything amorphous and short-lived,
as I expected nothing to last of us.
But when the waves break I still call them by name.
Like a frame within a frame the fossil
carried a carcass, a carapace,
and its own casket in another casket,
its own natural sarcophagus.
I never told anyone this story:
in a summer like this I ate a nectarine
until its rough corduroy pit, continued
rolling and chewing it until it hinged
open, and an inert spider, sitting
in white wisp, was inside like a small jewel.
How does a thing feel real. The layers
comprising me are, reductively, soft