Cork

I sit in Central Park with my near-same-age, crushed-by-life-these-days cousin,

and confess to the still air we both face forward into: “I feel like a cork in the sea.”

I glance at him, but he doesn’t look back from silence.

He long lived on another side of words from me, the interfered-with-by-speech-defect

cousin, his struggle to verbalize all but undetectable now,

and me, with early disability, undiagnosed-for-years-gland-problem

cousin whose hands shook, whole body shook like a small motor screwed to spine,

shook so I could barely grip a pen, mouth moving with joy-to-not-be-stifled words.

Both poor-students-parents-worry cousins, entered our teens growing tall.

I know it’s still here, in our 60s, glancing at a cousin the same size,

seeing one’s pain in the other, behind our not speaking for a year.

My capable-with-carpentry-hands cousin,

in early years wasn’t bookish but gave me the collected Yeats for my 15th birthday,

writing inside: “For Allan, to help with his education.”

Now, he smiles an embattled-but-good-nature-deep-under smile,

says: “You and your images.”

cork tossed  in a poisoned sea

white-knuckled cork

not ready for highs

or lows cork

bashed by high crests

cork dropping with wrenching speed

to the deepest opening of water

cork turned relentlessly

water close to taking it all apart

cork needs air

please stop I’m suffocating from

the waves cork

cork so far adrift

 it will stay lost

Victory

Seeking the power secrets of the sea colors,

I returned to my bottom depth, danced with shafts

of deep purple and deep blue and deep burning yellow.

I pressed from them, my hands spread wide to the

tinted water, forces I’d never found in people,

soaking in their dark-hued yet bright responses

to the touch of my palms.

I wanted to take advantage of the colors, for they were

the only advantage I’d ever had over the powerful—still, I worried:

From colors? Just touching colors? Would they, wet and luminous,

deflect the assault I’d face for being able to make them mine?

No, I concluded. I had farther down to go.

I stitched together transparent jelly fish that flew under the sea,

through the wavy light, bound them with transparent thread.

I gathered them as I surfaced, and their sinewy folds slid

on my skin as I wore them to the house of the powerful,

and the war over it—a colonial with a sloping roof and gables a mile from the sea—

that had lasted 300 years. They didn’t recognize me, the armies for either side;

soldiers made fast movements toward me, but I marched against them

dressed in my jelly fish robe. 

And that is how I won.