transform
you altogether. Again you miss
the Persiads, ergo
another bucket list with
a hole, dear Liza. Summer
examines its own
planet: another place
threatened, another youth taken
by a policeman’s bullet. And now
a high jumper rebounds
into the shape of a starfish. And now
the season of sinkholes,
cicadas, and pride parades
in which the young Prime Minister
struts in white slacks. Algae means
several unrelated
species; the Japanese
have many words for moss: facts
we repeat at parties as evidence of
the sparkle of the world
inside the sparkle of
ourselves. A daughter
is growing up and away. Of the girls
who went to Syria as
fighters’ brides, one has met
the fate waiting
for its middle to play out.
The planet of horrible things
washes her personal
items onto our dining tables
next to half-filled woodland
animal ceramics: epilator, lipstick,
underwear. Elsewhere
a loon flies overhead and on hearing it
you may say you live on earth.
Quietly next door
the neighbors make plans
to adopt their own
grandchild. Their daughter
puts on ever larger
sweatshirts and smokes
on the stoop with her younger
sister, her face placid,
bewildered, and humming
to the receding sun:
now this, now this.And now the internet has found a hermit crab housed in a blue-eyed doll’s head
separated from whatever other parts
had made her vaguely human. Her globed crown now crawls on eight sturdy legs,
a grotesque sideshow set nowhere
in particular except in front of us. It’s snow crab season in Quebec, also time
for fiddleheads, asparagus.
You know the season. The short one reserved for bright, sweet emerging things.
Click and her head will crawl again
on ten articulated legs. You might be tempted to think that’s it
for hermit crabs this week: enough
exposure, enough strangeness for one species but over in another corner
of this nowhereness, a wrinkled hand
folds and unfolds on loop to show dozens of miniature hermit crabs, a proper handful,
the fingers clenched to bursting
as if with bird seed. Each time they open, a swarm of misshapen Easter eggs clambers
over the other small, hard ersatz-bodies,
some green, some blue, some the many variegated shades of soil. Most are fast,
but even the apparently dead or dormant
eventually move, too—outward and away and off the edge of everything,
climbing over whatever is necessary
on tiny twitching feather legs. All at once a wonder and a horror and your average
case of standing by
to watch a stranger’s hand let water or other miracles slip through it.
Surprising and
gelatinous: suddenly seeing
an octopus
up close. Arrives
in the middle of things: marriages, diseases.
Hesitates
and flourishes in the uncertain pattern
of a dog lost
in the city of its own
residence. Traffics
in fractal, tentacle,
constellation, unset
collarbone. Gets
undone. Comes home.
Rebuilds
with interesting materials:
lost socks, gills, old news.
Allows moss
to cover what it will.
Does not see lichen
as decay but as a sign
of good air. Like your
grandmother’s
enormous aloe:
is prepared for burns
but also just to grow
in whatever light
is given. Shares
a common grief
for conflicting conditions:
here an emptiness, there
an over-brimming. Sees
a common nuthatch
out different windows.
Sarah Wolfson is the author of the poetry collection A Common Name for Everything (Green Writers Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Fiddlehead, Michigan Quarterly Review, AGNI, PRISM international, and TriQuarterly. Originally from Vermont, she now lives in Montreal, where she teaches writing at McGill University.