Deck Prism

Deck Prism

Come, rag of pungent

quivering,

            dim star.

                        Let’s try

            if something human still

            can shield you,

                                    spark

            of remote light.

                                    Denise Levertov

The gardener has inverted scores

of deck prisms, their flat-as-the-floor-

they’d-been-set-in bottoms facing

the dirt and the parsley, the soon

to blossom squash—row on row.  And its green

and milky crystal were geologies away from knowing

one another.

See, how the gentle cuff of the weeder brushes up

against the sway and picks each bug away

and carries them in a hollow globe?  And how some
crawl on the solid conical carving made, if there’s light

enough to see, of God’s very same startle

and shake.  In the beginning.  You remember.

That cosmic storm?  I don’t.  But I imagine

a crew holed up, seized in the cleavage

of a gale, how below deck the only light

they’d have would be what was

stored in those stones.  I imagine someone

reaching their hand up to it, a stow-

away maybe, his licy scalp, his pukey tunic—

and the pitch of the ship sends him hard aft.

And the crew laugh.  And none can reach him

when the hull opens like an udder

under the knife.  And the milk

of morning goes out with the crystals.  Scores.

Scattered on bottom.  Washing up

years later like stray sheep.  Gathered like hands

at mass holding the host.  And all those protruding

tongues.  And that lone gardener

still among the rows…and all that light

corralled from the dark.  And pooled.  And sent forth.