pro•found
Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers | Poetry
of a great state, quality, emotion my son can’t stop running into the ocean
orchestral bliss he smacks straight into limbs disputing spume
smack also the name for jellyfish gathered in collective luminescence
a knowledge which predates & will outlast us how do you draw the wind
he asked me once and what I could I offer but an inadequacy
involving angles of dune grass not the blow itself
but how we bow in its wake see: heartfelt, intense, grand, sincere
limit your adjectives, I warn my students you know how it muddies
the waters dulls the wave in breaking use only what changes
the object’s temperature, bearing, direction origin: pro-, before -fundus, bottom
but what existed before the bottom you know Rome wasn’t built
from the sky downward I joke as the midwife measures
the fundal dome tape unfurling across our daughter
who rushes out just after midnight her body bluebottled
& tangled in tentacle she’s in shock they said
from her own velocity 500 miles already from the ocean
four years after our son who lived and our other son who couldn’t
a field of knowledge, demanding great study the first time we lost
we never knew why the second time one of the trisomies
grew him slowly a cellular formula whose result is
not survivable why do they call it a field of knowledge
the emphasis on flatness seems exaggerated
what do you study when the field must lay fallow
waiting for those astronomical hormone levels to bottom out
marked by great learning slowly our son becomes a person
of letters arranging alphabets across the bathtub
with kabbalistic fervor NIHAD MANROAL ANTIHERO he writes
he says this is my album called Zaza’s Mule Songs
we’ve never discussed mules he’s frustrated by
only having one of each letter he chews our surname’s R
difficult to understand other kids have begun to tease
him already his brain zealous with an unpruned impulse
I hardly recognize he tells me he sees
Rapunzel’s hair unfurling in the sled’s wake faces in oatmeal
which he spells OATMEALT babies floating on the ceiling
I feel for him my kin would called him touched
which is a nice way of saying your intuition’s overcharged
it’s difficult to hold conversation when your words
traffic in ghost at, from, or extending to a great depth; very deep
though I know it’s profuse I’ve always been drawn to
the bottom of things Ursula with her snaggle-tooth eels Antarctica
the mall fountain’s coins the pool’s tiled Ts the story of
Baby Jessica’s fall the old well my father found on the property
cells of my children the deep freezer’s pelagic mysteries
showing deep understanding while we are driving to the beach
we discover my son can read anything CANTALOUPE SUNDAY SCHOOL
why school on Sunday he asks between long stretches
of anonymous peanut & soybean the pregnancy then 22 weeks
almost survivable I tried to tell myself my wife rotund
in her checkered bathing suit this is the easy part she says
of parenting extending far below the surface less easy is how
no one knows how queer it is sidling up to death on a daily basis
am I exaggerating I guess I mean I’m beginning to
understand collective vulnerability when I lift the second baby
to the window for the first time Ohio winter trees etching the big sky
I think how strange it is her life unfolds inside mine how porous
that membrane how cruel is the beached body’s purple swell
claggy cry her sneezing out the remnants from the ocean everyone forgets
don’t believe them when they say bring up your children
for me parenting is a practice of sudden depths plunging through
lacunae & arriving somewhere I couldn’t picture because
it is so far beyond myself this charge all-encompassing
listen listen who says our feeling isn’t knowledge