The Sixth
Year
Dissolving in Sea Water
© Pat
Power
May 24, 2007
For Patricia on the anniversary of her mother's death.
• • • • •
Purity, the maw of it, blackbirds and kestrels
against a sky the color of antique mah jong tiles, color of aspirin
dissolving in sea water as the sun bursts its amnion
of tattered clouds like the raw carcass of the heart revealed.
That sound is the ticking of paper lanterns in the storm.
Just that. It is hard
in the radiance of this world to live
but we live.
—from
Storm Valediction
Campbell McGrath
“A
latter-day Whitman, McGrath sings American in a voice at once electric
and eclectic, plumbing the best and worst of our society.”
—Library Journal, Best Poetry of 2004