"The Coastline"
An amputee on a bloodstained bed
lies outside the reach of nature poetry
the limbs cut off smooth as flint
polished by the sea, found on the beach
an easily simile, cut to the other news
"this night the wind combs the fjord"
one avoids the kelp covered rocks
as one does the coastline of banality
those godforsaken rhymes, and images
wash away with the tired metaphors
lona or lena, carol or karina sunning
her body, sunglassed, mouth clamped
was it in a Life magazine you first read
of Darwin and the iguana basking
in the centre spread of galapagos
did she really stay there so long?
made a makeshift fishing rod with bits
of net and a hook from a tomato and fish
tin, stood next to a pond waiting
but nothing except the gravid stickleback
her spines like leftover bones picked
between the teeth, her lumpen form
in my hand, placed her ever so gently
back into the pond, will I ever catch
a reader in this entrapment, will they
ever get beyond the pregnant metaphor
will they see the pink and white rocks
variagated as the transcendental works
of a Henry David Thoreau, the lines
the notches, the scatches historical
events marked by the sea and the wind,
the opaline pebbles could be jewels
mussel entangled rocks the hairnets
of aging sea nymphs --why not the oval
shape of mobiles of girls on the game
in Taiwan who use them as dildoes?
would it all be the same, crustaceans
shot through with salt and water lay
scattered as thin as slight papercuts
or the lengthy list of car crash victims
the death-look of the girl, the gape
of the stickleback, the easy compliance
of the couplets, on the prow of the flat-
bottomed ferry you can see a pink
ribbon of jelly-fish aliens billowing
in the light of an unnaturally late May.
Stephen Philip Pain
c/o Brown,
Kongensgade 15 1-sal,
5000 Odense C.
Denmark.
Tel: 66 12 06 22
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