Robert Adamson

Memory was the room I entered down a long corridor Thrown by the white drugs of pain though pain Was adrift on a glassy stream of green tide Where images flickered and ran on I didn’t write poetry for publication In those days but to grab the attention Of readers nearby who had been crushed by life Who floated across the exercise yard like headaches Smoking rag-cigarettes looking sideways For the next punishment for a break or maybe distraction Chips of memory kept rising to the surface Of our minds to take another bite I had no idea why poetry the squid caught me It clung to my brain in the damaging climate A creature in the alien element of air Arising from centuries of survival Thoughts must be inky and capable Of working the bait with a black beak For a quick kill and a metaphysical rise up through the abyss Poetry in those days was a handmade lure There were no fish or birds so I spun my lines To the ones with heads spring-loaded with resentment Their temper a red fleck twitching in an eye While poems of the future waited in line to hear my number

And there are Two birds In this poem A loon Hand-carved From balsa And a snakebird On the tide Of the river The oily head Of a water bird Cuts surface And glides Along by Tarred wooden Racks Ideograms Oyster farms Low on the tide Lower than The hand-carved Loon it looks Hardly buoyant A bird From two Worlds it knows The murk On the bottom And waves Crinkled by sun It swims As well As a black trevally Sleek and fast A challenge to Handcrafted birds To all things made up

These water birds flew out from the minds Of fishermen and became fishing peons Wealthy sailors watched as darters emerged again To spread drenched wings in the sun And marked them as emblems for spinnakers Painters and ornithologists studied darters Until they became black-feathered arrows That pierced the souls of their creators These birds rode surf of bitter laughter And wiped out on a zoo’s concrete Key Largo To imitate darters lovers ripped off their clothes And plunged into the swiftness of estuaries Down the water column they entered brackish hell Their hair transformed to iridescent plumage Ruffled by memories of earth’s human atmosphere We can experience the lives of these feathered beings By flexing our particular despairs each morning At evening we take in the news as best we can On late nights we gaze at dead bodies of water And almost perceive those wet wings working the tide