''Monomoy'', which is the title of this poem.
Monomoy is a, I guess it's an island now.
It used to be a Peninsula off of Massachusetts
but then a storm came through and made it an island.
Not that-- I just did the thing I
hate at readings where people make an explanation that,
who cares?
It's not important for the poem but it's
nice to know that that's the setting, perhaps.
All right.
''Monomoy''.
''Somewhere people must still do things like fetch water from
wells and buckets, then pour it out for those animals,
that long domesticated, would likely perish before figuring
out how to get for themselves.
That dog, for example, whose refusal to leave my side
I mistook as a child for loyalty,
when all along it was just blind.
What is it about vulnerability that can make the hand
draw back sometimes?
And can sometimes seem the catalyst for rendering
the hand into sheer force?
Destructive.
Don't you see how you've burnt almost all
of it, all the tenderness away.
Someone screams to someone else in public.
And looking elsewhere, we walk quickly past,
as if even to have heard that much might have put us
at risk of whatever fate questions like
that can spring from.
Estrangement, like sacrifice, begins as a word at first.
Soon it's the stuff of drama.
Cue the follow up tears that attend drama.
Then it's pretty much the difference
between waking up to a storm and waking up inside one.
Who can say how she got there?
In the ocean, I mean.
But I once watched a horse make her way
back to land mid hurricane.
Having ridden surfer-like the very waves that at any moment
could have overwhelmed her in their crash to shore.
She shook herself, looked back once
on the water's restlessness.
History is always restless.
And the horse stepped free''.
Lucky horse.