Dark Wild Realm by Michael Collier Page B

and touch my leg
so I might turn to kiss your lips.

BOAT RENTAL
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From the shore we could see the work it took to keep
the bow straight—constant adjudications
of wind and current. The boat, a kind of shuttle
threading elemental warp and woof. Each rower
faced the direction of his going, away from where he'd stood.
When the storm blew up they struggled to return.
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Earlier, when it had been our turn and the water smooth
with intermittent scuds that slapped a beaver's tail
against the skiff, I thought, "Who doesn't love
the middle of his life?" My voice whispering
crucial adjustments, not anticipations
but greetings of air and water, mediums of resistance.
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And then a man's voice, as if along a wire, traveled
from his mouth, in the middle of the lake, to my ear:
"Put your butt down, now!"Advice offered too late
to the tipping-over canoeist? Or from the shore,
more threatening, more resigned: "Why did we ever have
these children?"
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A teenager soaked from a water fight screams
for the other teenager to stop his splashing.
He doesn't stop, and she wouldn't want him to, really.
Amid their laughter and commotion a flock of mallards
rises from stockades of bamboo on Duck Island,
circles eucalyptus and palms, and then returns.
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What was once over the horizon is all around us.
The instruction in J-stroke not so much remembered
as imprinted—the saving gestures—and, of course,
the world divided between paddlers and rowers.
("There's room for a thermos and small ice chest.")
Few make a journey of diversion; most want a moment,
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not a story. It felt good, then, to be afraid for others—
to see the storm approaching and the boats
racing

for the dock. Finally, we all stood under the boathouse
and watched the vessels fill with rain. Those of us who were dry
were quiet, and those who were wet laughed,
uncertain if all the others had returned. Nevertheless,
we took pleasure in the cushions lifting off thwarts,
oars and paddles drifting away, the thermos bobbing,
while a plastic sack caught by its handles sang above us in a tree.

COMMON FLICKER
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Old nail pounding your way
into bark or creosote,
intermittent tripod
of legs and beak,
derrick, larvae driller,
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when I look up from
my mind I see what
you are: feather-hooded,
mustached, gripped
to the steady perch;
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an idea of the lower
altitudes sparged
with color, a tuber
of claws and wings
and an eye unmarred.
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Wing-handled hammer
packing the framer's blow,
face stropping the hardness,
drumming and drumming,
your song is your name.
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This will cure me,

you declare. This will

heal the fractured jaw,

soothe the vibrating helve

so I can eat, so I can sing.

INVOCATION TO THE HEART
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Speak to me now,
          alive, outside the body,
                massaged,
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lifted from this package—
          rigged, hybridized,
                a chunk of sulfide
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breeding worms—
          scorched, glittering,
                unburnable.
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The severed veins are eyes,
          ears the pericardium.
                No longer
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an abacus of click and slide,
          no longer the engine
              of this or that fist
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but a machine of foreclosure,
          aurora of occluded sky,
              veil over the fetish.
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Fill my mouth
          with imperfect speech.
                Remind me how you are
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part pig, part parachute.
          Root in me, slow
              my fall.
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Remember that each of us
          lay dead awhile
                waiting for the other.

A NIGHT AT THE WINDOW
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The moth detaches from a leaf
and swims up through the