Two Days After the Full Moon of August
We enter in. We come to find the million ways a universe can turn and turn away again, implosion and explosion all the same pink wonder and fact. Life startles itself into reproduction: we suddenly touch mermaids again, hear as swim the perfect song one, two, three, four—then nothing Day Five—six, seven, eight, nine, ten the ones with flowing hungry hair, deft fingers, breasts with eyes. We enter in. We try to enter in, imagining our planet will survive, support water clean enough to carry creatures that create the reef fragile as dust on a butterfly’s wing too many fingers fondle, tear. Spawn: the word leaves lips full as a purr, a prayer, a pure dream and imagining of all that’s possible, all that is good, for coral destroys nothing in its tight need to become. We know we have swum the same, fast or slow, sperm or egg, until our voices cried for breath and our hands curved with full-veined grasp, pulse the waves our blood remembered, heart in deepest sea. Salt shapes our wildest lust, so many fear the chaos where unless they grab they can’t control: islands dying fast. Who are we to sing out our need for God? We have named too much by ourselves. In the beginning, light and dark. In the beginning, ocean. With our stories (we enter in) may we reach the ignorant, soften their voices into listen, turn them like a tide.
For twenty years Katharyn Howd Machan led a writing workshop in Key West, Florida, to benefit Nancy Forrester's Secret Garden. Year-round she is a professor in the Writing Department of Ithaca College in central New York State. Her most recent collections are A Slow Bottle of Wine and What the Piper Promised, both winners in national chapbook competitions.