Steve Shavel

[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]