White Bird, a Duplex
The white bird is a half-celestial soul of man. – Carl Jung, The Red Book White bird of the sea, a sage set against me, come back in fragments – A gleam over glass. A pearl-button shirt. A handful of snow. My hands in the snow melt glass into tracery. You rise, gleaming, from cold water, hang briefly on weak currents of light. In the cold, I hang bells that ring for you over the water, but only death glances toward me from the horizon’s red line. If the news of your death ever reaches me, know that my line will shatter before its next breath. I will have no keel into air, no poetry, breathless. No salt and no rest. My shattering calls dissolve even now into dawn and its gently forced turns. Closing the dawn, I force the gentle and final dissolve, your turn from bone-colored sky. I am a pacifist as I break through your body. I swallow your bones in the pacific field. Waves break the black sage. White bird, now I contain the sea of your fragments. Come to me.
Dawn, at the Sea
a train crawls through the sand toward the cliffs. the unobstructed sun rises over miles of dusted black trees, a snow-covered castle, the cream of fresh milk, the untouched flat page of your epilogue, the cast of bleached animal bones at the roadside. I see how the fire of hell is the fire of starlight, and could never have been the red of correction, of flags, of soles, of roses, of fertility and manmade combustion – could never have been anything but this pure, and blinding, and terrible, and clean.
Marina Kraiskaya is a Ukrainian-American writer and editor of the journal Bicoastal Review. Find her poetry and nonfiction in Poetry International, Southeast Review, Mississippi Review, L.A. Review, Zone 3, The Shore, EcoTheo, Deep Wild, Leavings, Crosswinds, Petrichor, Pollux, and other journals. She lives by the sea with her two cats. Visit mkraiskaya.com to get in touch.
*Look out for our Ask the Poet interview with Marina later this week.