Godspeed
I draw a tattoo
of a vast octopus
from Minoa on my flank,
the sheltering arms,
the eyes on eyes on eyes.
Heat the waters
until they roil in salt.
Give me a mask
and an oilcloth cape
as I spiral the plaza.
I’m a go-between
up from the seas,
amphibian, an augur
who loses recall
of performance and rites.
Stick me on street corners
to whisper to cars.
Let me plant
a chew tab on the lips
of the cloistered family
that cures on the balcony.
They wait for a chorus
below in the alleys,
physicians and gypsies
long about their coming.
The Keel Seam
I build the kayak
in the frozen garage of night,
where space heaters warm
the vegetable age of my hands.
The spine emerges from planks so thin
they gurgle in resin soak,
a clumsy seam fused by epoxy
and wood flour, by honey, by dough.
It spans three times my arms’ embrace.
I’m the bared joint from bow to stern,
I’m the mending of a hard rip.
The beams soften but seem true and fair.
At tapered ends, gaps fill with treeless light.
The long boat becomes spectral,
a hull drizzled in chemicals
as I sand then glass out the fleshing wood.
Although framed by the bones of coasts,
bound with repellent skin, it still
wants to pull apart and ditch me
in dark waters with ancient fish.
The Diver
Divers entered the radioactive cooling pond beneath the Chernobyl reactor in an effort to close valves and contain the disaster - New York Times
I go down for the last time,
and there’s no one to come back to.
The village is vacated
and the sirens hushed,
some glasses of milk left
to thicken at dinner tables.
No one knows what becomes of us
when the pleading is done
and we’ve hidden away.
How deep I can go, deep only
into the sediment,
the something-it-once-was,
the electric shiver
of the wireless from ghostlands.
Past cesium and graphite
tumbling down, I go deep,
alone into darkness broken
by unholy glow.
I rub the hot stomach of the world,
it rumbles and drools
a thick web of iodine.
From underneath, the sky
heaves like a huge lung,
and muscles of water chew me.
I drift, dissolve
like a tablet on a tongue.
Down here,
being overturned,
space will taste of me.
Kevin Roy is a professor of Family Science in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland in College Park. For twenty years, he has taught, mentored, conducted community-based life history interviews, and published more than fifty articles and book chapters. Although he has been writing poetry for many decades, these are his first published poems.
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