Flood
BY ISABELLE EDGAR
That winter it snowed,
but only for a moment.
And then it turned to rain,
then more rain. Storm water
pooled in the basements
of houses by the marsh.
All the people who lived
on hills said thank god
we live on hills, and all
the people who lived far
from the woods said thank
god we live far from the woods,
though by then no one really
believed in god anyway.
When the pools of water
in the peoples’ basements
stilled, wintered, it got very quiet
for a while. During blackouts
everyone turned toward
the windows to make sure
they weren’t the only ones.
Some people made love
with their eyes open under
the light the wide sky offered.
No one mowed their lawns
anymore. The vines grew
green to red to crumbling away
toward Ram Island. A bird
had died in a nest in the tallest
leafless tree, and when the wind
blew, feathers fell down
in their own time and the people
tried to catch them in their hands.
On the last day of winter,
everyone had gone to sleep
early. A little warmer, little
lamplight, trails of smoke
from coals, a street light
flickered and then went out.
It would just be the two of you.
Leaning over the edge
of someone’s small boat,
tied loosely to the dock. Eyes
rocking toward and away from
their reflections in the black water.
When you see someone
upside down you see
their throat. The way
they swallow, the way
their pulse flickers
through thin skin.
And when the wind blew,
the whole thing
ever so slightly swayed,
the boat and your bodies
draped on its frame.
Hold Still
BY ISABELLE EDGAR
An albatross can fly into the wind without flapping its wings for six years
but planes must deconstruct the bodies of birds to learn how to fly.
To muscle through it. Staple papers to telephone poles, build dams,
and keep lights on through the night. We live on a coast, by a cranberry bog.
Early September mornings the fruit floats to the surface, slips off the submerged vine,
and into a palm. Puddles appear in the same grooved places each time it rains
and hurricanes unravel to a thread: a higher tide, a warmer breeze, an undecided current,
and your hand on the small of my back while we walk to the shore.
There used to be shade here, before the pitch pine’s canopy grew too wide
to hold still, acted as a sail and uprooted itself, the trunk, slick with algae,
now stretched from the high tide line to the sandbar like a tongue. Here, the land bends
around the water, the way the bone beneath your eyebrow curves into your nose
and harbors your eye, the water deep green. We undress and dive in, avoiding a wake.
To slip beneath the water like glass in the arm of the land.
It’s hard to catch a moth without killing it. It’s hard to get a splinter out on the first try.
To know your wingspan. To recognize your breath in a crowd.
I want to know the shape of your scalp when, each morning,
you rake your fingers through it, before opening your eyes.
