For a Moment
And if we go down the windzipped alleys,
under the volcanic cliffs, the lichen-swathed rocks,
where the sea sighs and swallows
there’s a window carved out of the grotto —
it’s black as depth, filthy, but open with the prospect
of inner-life. Come, we can swim over, we can go in,
not so spooky once you’ve swam up; chasmic,
it gives into a swell, a valley, it bobs, keens — clocks
in its walls like tree rings; beneath the sediment
more sediment, divots, clusters of urchin-pines
and some big ancient fish, tracks ticking over saline stone —
stay, do stay,
we’ll pick grapes from the neighbor’s vine,
we’ll swelter on in white linens, and swim
beneath the blown sky; tonight we’ll wash in the garden
with verbena soaps, we’ll kiss the Madonna on her porcelain brow.
It’s rolled ‘round at last: beating, beating —
and once August plunges in it all begins to beat
differently.
Time wrinkles, coaxed somehow it folds,
and eternity opens up again. Nothing so finite here.
There’s salt on the air, a puckered pit in my hand.
I break the apricots into neat halves, into perfect halves
of a plucked sun. A half itself is perfect. See
your eyes in the tidepool? They’re brimming
with moon. And those rustlings, at the bottom?
Would you take them, inflate them, make them full as day
— would you keep them? Cigarettes on the table;
cabbage leaves plastered to angry ankles;
blackberries in the hedges, snarling down — and if
you were to pick one, among the bluebells
and vitreous birds, the yawning dresses,
it’d squelch soft on your tongue;
soft as the thumb that smooths the child's face
when the minute hand comes knocking.
In this witching hour, this blanketed heat, we can mold
the moment; can roll it into one (1) word:
lucubrare, for example. Our every eye licks it up —
and this is it now, this humid hush.
Hiding out in the open, we become
the earth.
by Marti Wong
Marti Wong lives in Brooklyn, has a lovely dog named Yuki, and enjoys long walks in Prospect Park. Her work has been published in Stone Soup Magazine. Her literary icons are Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Carson — and she hopes, one day, to write as beautifully as they do.