Portuguese Man o' War
Jane Satterfield | Poetry
Full sail, a feat
of stylized rigging,
armed frigate, eating machine
whose armadas blow ashore
through warming currents,
to cooler coasts off Amagansett,
up the Atlantic as far north as the Bay of Fundy,
The Isle of Man—and I
who envisioned your technicolor
rays only in Our Amazing World’s
slick pages, centerpiece of
danger and display—how you swim
up unbidden, struck chord
like the wail of sirens, the warning
and the all-clear, the stark list
of grocery stash guaranteeing
post-atomic household survival. So you drop
that fine-spun glass pane
at the first sign of surface threat
to submerge or travel dark, lucent pools—
O blue bottle, spilled ink—
Even dead you deliver a sting.
Jane Satterfield’s most recent book is Her Familiars. She is the author of two previous poetry collections— Assignation at Vanishing Point, winner of the 2003 Elixir Press Book Award, and Shepherdess with an Automatic, winner of the 2000 WWPH, Towson University Prize—as well as Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, the William Faulkner Society’s Gold Medal for the Essay, the Florida Review Editors’ Prize in nonfiction, the Mslexia women’s poetry prize, and the Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Prize. She currently lives in Baltimore.
Featured Image by Pan Da chuan