Four Poems by Rebecca Dunham

 

Atavism at Twilight

 

Lance and drain this ravened sky—hat in hand we will

Always return to you, prodigal. I swear we knew

Not what we did. I swear. Land unscrubbed to rust,

Gashed and bare—hell’s toothed pastoral. No

Excuses. Pitchfork my soul, millet on your scale, but

Let not this harvest strip flesh from bones. Pray

Unsheathe your sword and make of my heart a ragged tear.

Salvage this earth, snarl grass and field. I will take it all.

 

Black Horizon

Grand Isle, Louisiana, 2010

Post-Deepwater Horizon oil spill

 

Like ribbons of kelp, they wash up

bark-black and stretching

as far as the eye can see—boys

sway in the waves, skin sheened

in oil as they toss the tar

balls in a quick game of pickup.

On the shore, cleanup crews

weave a path between beach

towels, hazmat-suited,

shovel and plastic bags in hand.

It never fails to shock: dark

pools oiling sands of blinding

white. I load my open palms

with them, testing their heft.

These scales cannot be balanced.

And always more cresting

the waves, merciless as death.

 

Elegy, Sung in Dirt

after the New York Times image of

the Deepwater Horizon’s collapse into the sea

 

Feather-vaned, the smoke

flows up, black-

 

blooded as the oil plumes

that soon will unwind

 

below. Boats spray

forth arcs of salted water,

 

the image suspended,

caught by the camera’s

 

shutter. By evening

this image—viral elegy—

 

will echo across screen and page.

I cannot look. No,

 

I am the poet of the eye

filled with dirt. Mouth

 

shut. But reader, tell me,

who among you could conjure

 

the gift, at such depths,

of seeing in the dark?

 

There Lies the Hydra

“BP and the Obama administration attacked the monster with chemical

dispersants … only to have it break up into hundreds of millions of smaller, more

terrible parts.”

Antonia Juhasz, Black Tide

 

1. Heracles and the Hydra

 

Attic red, the serpent’s figure

rises out of abyssal black,

thick-bodied, its brute

column flanked by our hero

and his love. Long odds,

this, mere scythe and torch

to the winding water-snake’s

poison breath and twelve

 

branching heads. Cut one

and two more take its place—

oh fruitful wound, this

house that feeds on death,

that multiplies on doom.

 

2. Corexit 9527A

 

:: to scatter the singular

gall to a manifold might

 

:: to disperse, to split

and suspend, to glitter fierce

in loose veils of oil

 

:: Statius—sunken, there lies

the Hydra. and cunning

grows dark in death agony.

 

:: sorbitan; propanediol;

ethanol; butoxy– .

sodium salt (1:1); octa-

decenoate. distillates;

petroleum; hydrotreated

light

 

:: to masticate dive gear,

boat engines, citizens’ skin

 

:: pockets of orange

and pink like a sun settling

over the sea floor

 

3. Boom and Skim

 

Vermiform, the citrus-bright

barriers float, shoring up

sheens of oil for the boomers

to vacuum and scoop, to bar

 

access to land. The crude oil

slick slips their Styrofoam

grip, even as authorities

outfit trawlers with more boom

 

to net oil instead of oyster,

shrimp, or crab. The Macondo

glitters, mirror-city teeming

as the Hydra’s flexed scales,

 

water’s dark-blue steel

embossed both silver and gold.

---

 

Rebecca Dunham is the author of three collections of poetry, The Miniature Room, The Flight Cage, and Glass Armonica. Her poems have appeared in Agni, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and The Antioch Review, among others. She is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.