POEMS From Interpretive Work
From Ice-Blink
Uncollected
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On the Magnetism of Certain Spots on Earth, Like Provincetown
Governor Bradford's wife, Dorothy, was drowned
in the harbor.... It would seem that the God of the
infidels, which they call chance, had a hand in this
mysterious jumble.
—Time and the Town, Mary Heaton Vorse
November. But still the wild light bounced
between sand and sky, uncultured. It was pulling her
apart,
 unlacing what held her.
Wind did its part, burrowing, pushing
grains of the new world into her seams, chafing there, rubbing
until the cloth couldn't hold.
An accident, then, not fate or
God's will, her fall out of air, out of the light's strange freedoms.
She had begun, you see, even on the rough journey, even in the dark
hold of the ship,
to believe in chance.
Chance that this spit
curled them, chance that the sun, just moments ago,
hit the dunes hard and came to her prayer-like,
as if all her other prayers had been just mumblings,
shadows rather than light.
There should be a word
for what I've come to, she thought as the waves held her,
made of her a precedent: to be the first to see
that elsewhere, anywhere, was worth leaving, worth casting off from
in order to land here, in order to come to even this rest.
—forthcoming in Knockout
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