Poem: Flanked

 Flanked

 

the sky swam,

flank of a shark,

darker toward the deepening night,

that grim Atlantic blue.

 

there were birches that had no leaves

who reached up like lymph nodes stored in jars,

and you could

 

almost taste the formaldehyde,

 

the kind that kept fond idols

immortal and bright enough

to float in outer space.

in fact,

 

without the moon,

and yet the inevitable frost,

the Sisters and the Crab loomed dog-bark crisp.

 

someone commented on the brute logic

of the nascent tumescence

in those skeletal, orbital shapes,

 

somewhat a comfort,

 more vast than Euclidian,

those fonts of joy,

more ‘in the eye,’

 

and yet they curved down,

all human concepts do,

into the choppy iron of the Atlantic,

toward the golden ambush

of the great Devourer.

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6/21/24 .. heavy mods

11/28 Flipped the prepositions in lines 16 and 17,  "of" "in"