Poem: Flanked

 Flanked

 

the sky swam,

the flank of a shark,

darker toward the deepening night,

the grim Atlantic blue.

 

birches that had no leaves

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.

 

without the moon,

and yet the inevitable frost,

the Sisters and the Crab loomed dog-bark crisp.

 

some commented on the brute logic

of the nascent tumescence

in the skeletal, orbital shapes,

 

somewhat a comfort,

 

and yet more vast than Euclidian,

more ‘in the eye,’

 

as they curved down

over the choppy iron of the Atlantic,

toward the onyx ambush

of the great Devourer.

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