Mary Makofske: “Small Boats”
SMALL BOATS
Coffins rise and float out of the earth and ride into the villages, fishtailing on the liquid streets and banging on the doors of houses.
—Roger Rosenblatt, Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats
Whatever could be carted away was gone, even bodies
exhumed from under stones where time had rubbed out
names, but the unmarked graves and burial grounds
grown over were forgotten, drowned when the waters,
corralled by the dam, rushed in and milled over the valley.
Why should it matter? Life so long absent from bodies,
bodies not even that now. Disjointed bones. Strands of hair.
And in Venice crypts arranged like postal boxes
above avenues of water that rise and lick their floors
like wolves waiting for the fire to die down around
the huddled humans. Why should we care
whether earth or fire, air or water—
even vultures circling the body laid out for their feast—
return us to the elements we spring from?
Better than skulls on medieval scholars’ desks,
coffins that rise with the flood, “fishtailing
on the liquid streets and banging on the doors
of houses.” Blind, skeletal Cassandras
coming to wake us while we still can wake.
If you think the world cannot hold so many
of the living, think of the dead, and where
will we put 10 billion, even their ashes,
or what cemeteries, stretching miles, will hold
their coffins, for a while at least,
until the rains come and the water rises?
Mary Makofske’s poetry chapbook, The Gambler’s Daughter, has recently been published by The Orchard Street Press. Her latest full-length books are World Enough, and Time (Kelsay, 2017) and Traction (Ashland, 2011), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize. Her poems have appeared previously in Valparaiso Poetry Review and in other literary journals, including Poetry, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, Spillway, Little Patuxent Review, and Talking River Review, as well as in nineteen anthologies. She has received the Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, the New Millennium Writings Poetry Prize, and the Malovrh-Fenlon Poetry Prize from Quiet Diamonds.