And one more for this book where there's
sort of that narrative structure or a thing happening in time
gets extremely tenuous as you will hear.
And actually, nothing happens at all in this poem.
But it's a way of sort of moving through space.
So there's linear quality that I found useful.
There's a reference here to a child.
The child is Robert Collier, who is
the son of a graduate of the University of Arizona.
The poem is called "Effort at Speech,"
which is a phrase that I take from William Meredith, who
wrote a poem for Muriel Rukeyser, a fantastic American
poet, who had written a poem called "Effort at Speech."
And after her stroke, Meredith wrote a poem
for her called "Effort at Speech."
So this is my poem for Mr. Meredith
after his stroke called "Effort at Speech."
And the location of the poem is the aquarium
in Baltimore, Maryland.
"Nothing was as we'd thought, the sea
anemones not plants but animals, flounder
languishing on the sand like infants waiting to be turned.
From the bottom, we followed the spiral ramp around and up,
circling the tank.
Robert, barely out of the crib, rode
his father's shoulders, uttering words or parts of words
and pointing ceaselessly toward the water,
toward some one of the many shapes in the water, what
he could not name, could not describe.
Starfish, monkfish-- not fish--
catfish, sea hare, sea horse.
We studied the plaques for something to prompt him with.
But he tucked his head as if shamed.
So I left them at the school of the quick
yellow-with-black-stripes conventional,
passed the armored centenary turtle going down as I went up.
Seaweed, eels, elongate gone-gray suede bodies
of the prehistoric sharks transverse the reef,
and headed to the top, thinking to look down
through the multiple layers.
When it first came at me, it seemed more creature of the air
than of the sea.
Huge, delta-winged, m head subsumed in the spread
pectorals--
unless it was all head--
a kite gliding to the wall between us, veering up,
over, exposing its light belly, "face"
made by gill-slits opening, the tail's long whip and poison
spine.
Eagle Ray, cordata, like the eagle,
it skated along the glass.
Eagle scanning the sheer canyon wall,
bat trapped inside the cave, no, like a mind at work, at play,
I felt I was seeing through the skull and then away."