The Raft Of Medusa

Unmooring

Step over the corpse
and onto our raft,

past the cameras
and onto the raft—

wherever you step, the raft
tilts toward you, tilts you toward

the corpse-colored sea keeling over
the sides, fumbling through the gaps,

swallowing its body back,
heaving you inward: it reeks

sliding over you, whatever you hold
to mean not-yet-drowned,

the way you know the raft
is snapped masts lashed too late,

and a mast is a stripped tree,
a big stick, so a broken mast goes

stick stick stick stick stick it clacks
sidewalk-wise across picket-fence gaps

until the raft heaves and we slide
clinging to shit-smeared slats and thighs

—oh body made stranger than water—
and you think you are home in the city

which is crowds unhoused in a Dome,
city this raft unmoored from the ship

that towed it, human weight a drag,
adrift for days past the cameras.

2. Fever

Take my hand—you’ve got phrenetis calenture,
heat breeds it in you sailing nowhere so long,

fever of going nowhere, it makes
a home in your head, and you’re the man

who walks off the raft into waves
where he sees a street he knows,

going nowhere, there, take my hand,
you’re the woman lost in a house

where the sea tossed books
and couches, where the sea broke

walls and teacups, where the sea
drowned her dog in the attic, there,

take my hand, you’re almost home,
you’re playing chess with a stranger

in the Dome, you excuse yourself to climb
over the railing, call “move-aside-please”

to the crowded tier below, take
my hand, before you step—

oh mirrors sick
with sludge and gasoline, faces leached
from family pictures, and a ship-like speck
that frets our horizon
flits away——

3. The Atelier

The painter arranges cadavers
he will live with in his studio;

he’ll paint two rags and a stick on our horizon,
we’ll wave a red bunting, stirring the air—

Stepping back into your city, wherever
you step the city tilts toward you

its corpse. Blue, clear as glass,
the sky shatters light through trees

the winds sucked and snapped, into gaps
of charred bricks where houses burned,

on the gravel-patched levee breach
where a block-long barge, unmoored

in the canal, battered as the storm surged,
battered until the waters heaved

earth and streets aside, shattered
home. Here’s someone’s purse, someone’s

drowned book. Here’s the barge,
stuck in its impersonal etc.

Oh naufragé, shipwrecked one,
friend made strange by water—

The painter takes up his brush and,
smelling dead flesh, paints it.