[from Steve Shavel's How Small Brides Survive in Extreme Cold, Verse Press, 2003]
How Small Brides Survive in Extreme Cold [excerpt]
2
Every
word occludes another, just as
every
perspective cuts across some larger circuitry — logjams
of
purposiveness, the whole farrago
of
incidence, everything a something
taken
out of context, the stunned minnow
in
the heron's crop
mouthing
the vowels of horror,
or the way
you
wake up sometimes with a
loded
word on the tongue
the
odd fragment
of
dream cipher (today no
kidding
it was tatterdemalion).
But
of the mechanism, spring-
wound,
that drives these recirculating
waters,
disgorged on the hill towns in
last
night's storm or unlocked
from
the rockface its last
blue
icicle integument, trundling
past
stubborn milltowns and
former
milltowns, their trestles
cantilevers
and
crumbling
abutments,
their
sullen smokestacks,
rosettes
of identical split-
level
around the cul-de-sac,
sluiced
through the archaic reactor
whose
lab-coated acolytes
scrutinize
the apparatus, tending
the
device
its
dread core their queen
hived
and bloated with light,
turning
bend after bend
of
perturbation to get here
where
the currents slow to spread their snares
and
drop their sediment —
we
are all of us oblivious,
taken
in entirely by the parade
of
forms, the events and detritus
that
drift across the meniscus of consciousness.
Only
the sandpiper it seems
sees
past its own reflection —
and
the kingfisher, who lunges now
through
the shattered pane
to
that low strange corridor
its
glimpse of minnow where
last
year's leaves in a
spectral
cortege, lit
with
the amber half-light
of
the after-life
leach
their tannins or settle
little
by little a skeletal tracery
into
the bottom silt,
thick
as the dust of an undisturbed
necropolis.
While
above an unseen hand works feverishly
to
smooth the sheet of other-being
over
the ever-unmade bed of the river.
And
while I'm going on like this
a
something noses closer through the shallows,
something
I didn't notice, nor
he
me til
thwack
and
recoil
the
beaver startled startles back
his
blackjack tail on the water's pate
then
thwack
again
KERTHUNK
in
spreading rose-windows
of
concussion. The Willow-Manitou
looks
on and marvels.
An
after-sprite of droplets shivers down.
Several
weeks now he's been at it
this
waterlogged carpetbagger
interloping
both the banks up and down.
Daylong
the air endures the rasp
and
crepitation of his handiwork, a
jigsaw
of precision, each chiselled branch
a
deftly-placed sprag in the works.
For
these two are pitted
here
and everywhere
one
against the other:
the
curving intelligence of river,
the
Cartesian architectonic
of
the beaver, part iconoclast
breaking
the symmetries,
troubling
the face of the waters, part
masonic
artificer, geometrician,
master
anaesthetician, plotting and fretting
to
put the river under and
three
or four in confederacy
equal
to an entire
army
corps of engineers.
But
for now the river doesn't give a damn.
Rather
it is the dam that gives.
And
so on and so forth through the spate of May . . .
 |
Steve Shavel
[photo by Jenna Sunshine] |
