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Endowment Arts & Letters Editorial Staff Learn about the MFA Program
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Deep-Sea Sponge
By: Michael
Waters |
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Venus’s Flower Basket Euplectella aspergillum
All
froth & spiral & vast interior architectural complexity, this latticework skeleton beckons shrimp in their fierce but
spindly throes
of seasonal mating, twenty-legged couples who cross the thousand thresholds, small enough to be
housed in
such spicular domesticity, but who then grow too large to leave, remaining forever paradisiacal lovers, or bitter cagelings undone by Darwinian trickery— unlike maggots, which seethe with
festivity, each grub inside a skull an
individual brain
cell engorged with furious speculation regarding its
final destination. Within either cathedral’s rich
brocade, worm
or prawn labors to return ritual to pagan roots—gluttony & lust— while we who found the sponge,
under less pressure,
wing it back to our suburban home to decorate a hutch, to remind each
other how we
survive, and why we love. |
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Tzaddikim Nistarim —(Hebrew): the thirty-six unknown men in each
generation
who keep the world from falling apart Brain-damaged,
the residents shriek like crows in the pure pleasure of
recognizing each other as they tug us into Bricolage Arts. Here is a
cardboard tube smeared red, studded with papier-mâché O-mouthed
angel heads. Here is a
wooden matchstick schooner rowed
by creatures winged with wire who angle their bent craft toward safe harbor. In the chapel,
our rapt guide prays as he
was taught: palms smashed together, thumbtips
pressed to lower lip
in the hope that whispered
amens might ski down that fleshy slope, then shoot like fireworks toward Heaven. Years ago, my
grandmother recited her seven names for G-d—
Yod Heh Vav Heh Yeshua
Yahweh Elohim Hashem El-Shaddai… I can’t
remember them all, though grew
fervent in their whirling, each groaned syllable bracing my desperate faith. One woman with
Down’s syndrome grasps my
wrist and sweeps my cheek with water and blue dust seeping from her chalkboard sponge. A mark upon us
both now, we ghost into the crowd— some few souls
bearing inky webbing,
strange ciphers; others tattooed invisibly, unable to
recognize one another,
though even in their simple gestures— buying a
bird-shaped terra cotta whistle or crooked wax candle—they
save us. |
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Diving
Horse
Steel Pier mid-20th C The Diving
Horse in Spends
pre-show hours heedless of the pending Plunge, nose
down in the burlap sack of oats, Unable to
summon local wonders: Herself atop
the jerrybuilt scaffold Where she
gazed upon the unfamiliar Paddock of
salt pool furrowing below;
Or the awed,
human hush of spectators Unlike the
effortless silence of stall Deepened by
king snake, rat rustle, barn owl. The barbed
recollection of plummeting Strikes only
as inkling and occasion Synchronize in
a wallop of water— Then
recommences its swift erasure. Humdrum and
soaked, she ambles to her crib Where only one
kind of quiet holds sway, Locust and
wasp, nose down in the burlap. |
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