Barcarole + Sensilla

Larissa Szporluk

Hear the warning in the sleeping ice:
Too warm, too soon.

Hear the thundering
leaden heaven, the same dream,

same unalleviated anguish,
echo through the grotto

like a skulk of thieves—
breaking can be golden.

Boats are knocking on the cracking water,
Swans are thin with longing;

hear them being eaten from within,
same fever, larvae, gnawing…

Hear the couple being tossed
until what’s left of her

is left of him, unconscious fish,
moving well together

now that it’s not sex. A crocodile watches
from the transitory shore,

letting out a hail
of precious stones. It’s just a moment.

Then it will be over —
the ire, and the flood of thanks.

Sensilla

Moon-fish sing with their teeth,
grinding their incisors.

The runaway young,
in a place that hurts,

ask themselves out loud,
Is that father at the bottom,

calling, singing, grinding?
Will he find us?

All the little hairs,
membranes, labyrinths,

pores, all the little
fluid-filled tubes and spirals

in the world cannot save them
from the shark.

If only they would petrify,
erasing every pressure wave,

like chicks that stiffen
in the chicken-hawking shade,

instead of this paroxysm
some call dance—

danze macabre,
impulse that the body makes

to call upon the afterlife
to wrestle it away.