Limus Polyphemus
BY SALLY KEITH
It feels so
I don’t know, necessary—
Winter had been and then afterward the spring
so long, so long—
extend the trip and see the friends, extend, extend—
something like
a string
unspooling too easily, or, no, a conversation kept
underground. Easy enough for someone
young ends the Neruda, I kept trying to understand
concerning the idea of needing to learn
from the sea—well, no, not
from but of, accordingly
little gesture in translation
I can almost touch
but, no, make no sense of, gesture
unrelated to the poem’s final lines
where the guy, I guess,
against stasis prefers a wave.
Poem supposedly rooted in song.
It was afternoon and whether accident, or errancy,
I don’t know
hundreds on hundreds,
we could not have run without injuring them,
what with all the dogs and little boys,
Limus Polyphemus,
a washed-up sea of them, upturned
coliseums, ancient models for army tanks, minuscule dinosaurs,
outsized insects, and yet
still less the fact of the species more
the number of them,
just as the shoreline’s subtle bend
led us, let us
where we had not seen.
We did not mean to be where we were. I don’t recall
the phase of moon, nor whether or not
the Red Knot population had arrived, pausing their journey
to Tierra del Fuego
for the tiny polyphemus eggs they eat, the protein
from which they need
to double their size.
The tip of Argentina is pretty far to fly.
Dinner tonight will be fine.
Give me an inch, I’ll take a mile.
I believe it was the grocer’s consternation
at my asking after preserved lemon
that convinced me
to abandon the Branzino plan.
The boys could flip crabs right-side up forever.
They help
those halfway stuck, using the swordlike-long-stick of a tail.
Poor beast. Take Odysseus,
jet-setting, clever, fastening men underneath pigs, escaping
the newly blinded (poor,
poor) one, over there crying “nobody” unknowingly, putting pain
out into the air in the form
of Odysseus’
then blanked out name. What even is it about nature
that can feel so far away?
The boys want guns and swords.
I want to go out alone for a run.
The female crab buries clutches on clutches of eggs, some
you can see on the internet
served up in the scooped-out shell
like a bed of bad cous-cous interrupted by herbs.
Limus Polyhemus likes a full moon, likes to dine
on algae clam and worms.
I imagine the scientists in lab coats,
spilling from average cars
to cart them away, hitching them sanitized
in a line, to a needle, to a machine to leak
their magical milk-blue blood,
blood without which
these new vaccines cannot succeed.
Deus ex machina, I cannot not repeatedly feel
a little surprise
as the hidden creature exerts itself and like
the lurch of a wind-up toy
the ancient dome
advances, less
the dragon-drawn-chariot-swooping-down
for-Medea kind of thing—
too artless, too convenient—just the simple sense
of something small in something large.
A kite on the sand.
In the cooler, a cold can.
A circle of chairs for old friends.
I know, give me an inch and I take a mile.
Extend the tip, let’s just see them, the friends a few miles north.
What’s one more day plus another afternoon.
It’s worthless to wonder if and when this all might end.
Ideas make me sick is my own rendition of Francis Ponge.
“Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth” is Kate
in Taming of the Shrew. Agreed
from a feminist perspective, it’s a little too much, except for,
here, the choice to cast the play with no reference to sex,
I mean gender. Anyway,
that’s what the director said.
We had seats on stage.
Had already married, already
mothered.
Something small, something large.
A great dinner in a tiny restaurant
I can recall, though not specifically, the words
the king said corresponding with the actor’s strong,
no, beautiful, out-stretched arms.
Then something I had once read occurred to me
a little encouragement, a little wave of—
here, here I am, again…
The horseshoe crabs have lived for longer than
some dinosaurs ever did, the track they dig back to the sea,
seen best at low tide, starts
with a curve
which makes it feels runic, other-worldly,
awe inspired. Their tri-partite body
dominated by that dome-shaped head, a head
with a brain and a heart practically side-by-side. They say
Limus Polyphemus is disappearing. In turn,
the Red Knot population. As for us, us friends, we
found an old shirt to hang on a stick
to tell us where to turn for home, for otherwise
the repetition of the dunes
we found very selfsame, utterly overwhelming.
