Anecdote of the Border Crossing
Impossible, but somehow light still
floods these narrowing days:
wrought iron & swollen with bells.
What city isn’t a record of our disasters?
Wherever the river touched & receded
someone marked its height: mid-calf,
a man’s waist. Imagine
the city not domed. Not brick
repeating beautiful & beautiful, but drowning
or sieged, seized… Imagine creak of wood
underfoot like rotting. Or fruit—
their waxy rinds come off whole & accumulate
under stands of stacked crates swept up mornings pass.
Look: chestnuts come wrapped in days-old news
& each hour unfolds more distance between us.
Say any thing & feel the word expand
your throat, float over the tongue.
Now imagine that water rushing in.
Anecdote of the Border Crossing
Here fishing boats & here the sea.
Here sheets like sails between tile roofs,
like consolation, blur of shoreline. Always
at some edge—where we search,
ourselves barely legible. Or
that dust. Here everywhere.
Here even in our mouths.
Here not burying now,
not like it did: ancient cities
six meters deep
under cubic tons. Here
no weight could warn.
No weight could silence.
Here marvel. Here wonder. Here that ash.
Here those mouths—
those mouths still.
Art Information
- "Skeleton Leaf" © D G Brown; Creative Commons license.
Beth Marzoni’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Puerto del Sol, and Grist, among others. Her collaborations with Monica Berlin have been published in Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, and New Orleans Review, among others. Their book, No Shape Bends the River So Long, won the 2013 New Measure Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Free Verse Editions at Parlor Press in 2014.
Marzoni co-edits Pilot Light, a journal of twenty-first century poetics and criticism, and teaches writing and literature at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
