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Debora Greger

Head, Perhaps of an Angel

limestone, with traces of polychromy, c. 1200

[view as PDF]  

Point Dume was the point,
he said, but we never came close,
no matter how far we walked the shale
broken from California.
Someone’s garden
had slipped, hanging itself by a vine
from the cliffs of some new Babylon
past Malibu.
Drowning the words
the wind didn’t fling back in our faces,
the Pacific washed up a shell:
around an alabastron
of salt water for the dead,
seaweed rustled its papers, drying them out,
until it died. Waves kept crashing
into the heart
of each shell
that I held to my ear like a phone,
but they were just the waves of my blood.
And through it all
I heard him say,
how could it be nine months ago
his grandson had taken his own life,
somewhere back east?
He was fifteen.
O Pacific, what good is our grief?
Something screamed at the sandy child
who poured seawater
into a hole.
Child, you will never empty the ocean,
Augustine said. How can I believe?
The wet fist of a wave
dissolved in sand.
Like a saint, a seagull flapped down the beach
in search of something raw—an angel
with an empty pail?
No, a teenage boy,
hands as big as a man’s, held a sea slug
quaking like an aspic. Under a rock, another one
drew into its body
a sea creature
larger than itself. Live, said Death,
to child and childless alike, indifferently.
I am coming.

 

(1999, Volume 20.1)

 

[view as PDF]  

 

 

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Literature & Democracy

Tomas Venclova

“A principled stance against aggression should never turn into blind hatred. Such hatred does not help anyone to win . . .”

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