Oceans in Davenport

Blood drips and ripples and mixes with rain, men and women with callusing hands grin And grimace at a gratifying pain.

Fifty pounds, thud. Fifty, the pounds thud. Fifty pounds thud.
The weight of saving your house.

It could be that god is drunk, or suddenly embattled with blindness.
For he’s raining metamorphosis on the earth, but he’s uncharacteristically clumsy today.

Often his shifting finds us in the gentle crawl from an aging chrysalis,
A peaceful prison break, filmed in slow motion,
Ambitions saying simply, “I no longer fit in this.”

Or beneath our feet the wits of stones are primed against each other,
A rocky tectonic chess, at the fingers of a timid trinity, negotiating strategies with the great plates of earth,

Stirring a fire deep, god the blacksmith draws pieces from the depths,
Holding magma in his palm until it cools into the versatile tyrrany of one tall and Temptuous queen.

He shapes her crown and names it Himalaya and sets her to war with the mountains west.
Invisible underfoot the plates dance and whisper in taunt and jeer,
Black space to white space kitty-corner mockery.
The soil trembles in anticipation of the next most perfect move.

And on the earth at any time is an audience honored with survival,
The humbled few fortunate enough not to have wandered too near to the temperamental Hand of our nature’s selection.

Where the sea’s populations play and hunt in miles of dark water so cryptic,
That land dwellers console themselves, insisting the deep mystery is peaceful, benevolent, Pacific.

The tedious forces of life spin molecules together, laying grand wagers upon minutia,
Casting lots on the assets of those who will perish when they fail to understand why its
Crucial.

If you dare learn from that which is deaf and mute and blind,
Then hold your life as poetry to the forests and present yourself as a student to the magic That stirs there.

The sluggish looms which phantoms laid in the soils at a time long past,
Spin now with a grace that weaves roots into trees, the guardians of an ancient artistry, Clothed in the garments of treatise composed in prehistory.

But today the divinator has no answer.

Change now raps on the city gate, holding our expectations impaled on a stake,
A conqueror it comes to plunder and take, torches alight by the black gold of this place.

Where before it whispered that art is in the ebb and slow tide of inanimacy,
It now reminds us that the devil just sits adorned in his favorite mask of complacency.

From everywhere the ocean comes, places before it never rested,
My garden my farm my fields my stock, my home, my life, drowned.

It rose from the dirt, came rudely from the sky, it melted from the white linings of winter.
Planets probed to retaliation spawns seas in spontaneity.

Thud. God pulls the bottle from his lips. Thud. In a daze he asks, “what is this clenched in my grip?”
Thud. He looks and sees a pale blue blip. Thud. The place where the earth has stood.

Thud. A crimson creek permeates the river and runs into my neighbors boot. Thud. We’ve slowed our pace unlike the rivers haste which continues unabated under this moon – if only scientists could’ve predicted this.
Thud.

Sigh. I watch a blister ooze its defeat, commencing a pitiful forfeit. From his mailbox my partner sails a fishing boat till it runs aground on his front step.

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