Mark Cox: Two poems

The Pier

Like a scarecrow pulled into halves

and shaken out for storage,

my shirt and jeans were drying above the tub.

I'd been in and out

of the bathroom all night, flustered

by child-proof caps and tepid, chlorinated water,

and each time the clothes twisted toward me

on their hangers.

Maybe they were still dancing,

maybe they missed their closet at home,

maybe shirts and pants can miss each other,

feel useless on their own.

But like the sand ringing the corroded drain,

in exile from the hotel beach,

there was no sense to any pretense

we'd ever find a way back.

That day, I'd watched an elderly wife trail her husband

down to the sea, where he waited and they entered

at exactly the same time, then held to each other,

their waists disappearing and emerging in the waves.

They were like this for a good while, and I imagined

her calling him "baby" and him saying something silly,

like, "I'm glad I'm not a buoy without a gull,"

after which, she patted him on the swimsuit-

an almost imperceptible, fluid gesture beneath the water-

then moved toward the beach, as he, as if prompted by her,

began to swim to where the channel markers dip and bob,

pausing now and then to backstroke, so that he could

look at her looking for shells.

"No way, Jose,"

is what she said when he called to her.

I had dreamed all night of a man trying to teach me

his precisely convoluted way of tying trout flies.

It took me hours to get it, and then,

not only could I not pick up

the micro-thin leader to attach it,

but there was no water in the dream,

it was useless.

Waking then, it scared me, just how much

I wanted to be alone.

This was when I recalled the old bathers. And how

a young boy's kite shuddered and dove over our heads,

making a metallic, tearing sound in the wind,

like the zipper of a garment bag

big enough for all of us.

And how people sidled in thin strings along the pier,

whose pilings proceeded two by two out to sea.

The River

That fear inside me all this time,

the chicken wire I could almost see through to,

turns out to be just a childhood-

fully formed, but boyish,

wrapped in a blanket

within shouting distance

of the house he grew up in.

It's 3 o'clock in the morning,

the inside of black, blacker, even

than the hair of the woman he'll later marry,

and all he wants now

is to be swallowed whole by sleep-

to sleep and add the sound of his breathing

to all the night sounds around him.

He has yet to realize his family

is part of the world and so he has renounced

with it the world and so he is sleeping

beside the night, not with it. He cannot

throw his leg over the night anymore

than he can throw his leg over himself,

the sound of black does not yet run through him,

and no matter how black his sleeves,

the pale palms of his hands remind him

he is himself still, separate.

That stone in the brook,

like the knuckle of a hand-

is the river in it

the way he wants to be in someone?

He needs to think that,

splitting the stone, he would find its center

damp as the very late or very early mist

that finds its way into the heart and dissolves

its boundaries. He does not yet know

the mist takes its shape from the emptiness

of the world, it begins there

between trees and houses,

in the margins of singularity

that allow us to see each other.

He doesn't know the mist would mean nothing

were the world whole,

or that the world is whole because of the mist,

or that though one day he'll no longer see himself-

though that boy will seem no more to him

than a log softened by flame-

the rock, at its heart,

was wet with the river,

and the river flowing more slowly through rock,

was nonetheless a river for that.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Nov 1995
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