As hostages ate Polow in Tehran
I listened in a small room in Sausalito
among beaded skirts, patchouli oil
and fading peace signs
Music boiling under water
words cut from men dead
re-animated with the plucked strings
of a flat wooden dulcimer
Like a prized swordfish he caught
Rilke’s words iridescent and fighting
he gutted and cleaned, held them out
undeniably “my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.”
Always in salty fog shifting past windows
sea mammals and beaches, particularly
The Dead Seal Near McClure’s Beach
he feels “as if a wall of my room had fallen away.”
Geoducks grew large, priapic
through displaced sand large enough
for soup boiled over in Los Angeles
for video secrets and renegade sheriffs
Surfacing again, a far-off periscope
clanging drums and moving men up mountains
harnessing wild men back, banging them
into shape like so many harriers, fitting the shoe tight
Now the girls are better off plucking
the strings of the lute while
lapping the loins of Neruda and Lorca
as they whisper their delight into their hands alone
Lisa Kusel 