Maureen Thorson
　

Sailor's Warning

There's no one to rock but the waves,
and the waves don’t care, the waves don’t care
even about being the waves.

Only you will care for them―measuring
their length and breadth, their height and color.
You will learn the wind:

Thunderheads at an insane distance,
dawn a red slick along the ocean’s defeated perspective.
You’ll know this like the halfmoons

of your nailbeds, hardbitten, salt-stung.
You’ll smell the diesel sweat
of a thousand ships, become one with tar and rope,
the waves that don’t give a damn,
and know yourself, at a distance.

You’ll know that no one knows you.
　

Educational

Two dioramas down, the drunken sailor
Admires a deep-sea diver, standing

On the sea bed like a summons,
A dull blank porthole of a mask

Asking visitors to just forget, forget it all.
The sailor leans his forehead against the glass

As I take off to circle aimlessly
Beneath the life-sized blue whale

Strung from the ceiling, caught mid-dive,
Its gaping mouth an invitation

To a kind of darkness that could be total,
A promise that could hold you closer,

Never stop singing you back to the salt.
　

From Apples To Oranges

Lambing time at the Hotel Cordillera―
all firm flesh and soft angles as
young men the color of graham crackers
pad down the sugar sand to test
the waters with their bodies. The girls,
brought here by snowbird parents
for a week of tropical sunshine, sip
virgin mimosas beneath umbrellas―
all orange juice and ginger ale
and the soft laughter that comes
from watching boys, stifling squeals,
and sooner or later hands behind
the cabana, eyelashes fluttering
in the old language of fans, their
yes-please, and oh-if-you-would,
that definitive shut-me-and-shake.
　

"A Total Victory For Chaos"

The bed’s unmade. New-washed clothes
Go unfolded. The dining room’s a storehouse
For mail, old checks, sunglasses, bracelets,
the jetsam of days and days.

*

We’re gonna be museum pieces, someday.
We’re gonna dry up and get stable.
Well-catalogued.

*

For now, fold yourself into rumpled sheets, pick
your outfit from off the piles on the floor.
Tell the TV that you like what it’s doing, give the fridge
a bye on the tomato with a life of its own.

*

We’ve eased into splendor.
Into broken chickens and whole mermaids.
Shoes traipsing the floors unfooted,
until we trip over them, unshod.

*

We left some glasses on the roof.
We left our books outside.
We left our bodies tumbled up.

*

Yankees v. Pirates. A room away, I hear the
gasps floating overZZ Top opining
on women and their attitudes.

- all poems previously published at Locus Point