Craig Goodworth, Select Artifact (dipped manuscript), 2010
Finite Number
The endgame is unflattering My phone’s
not waterproof not ringing I’m treading
heavy water growing more and more
numb Counting out the sea birds this far
from land Petrels Puffins You arrive at a
finite number a conclusive number You extrapolate
the coming moment while losing your means
to make something of that hard-won data
My blood stream slowing How can I
distinguish water from sky? The silver boundaries
mix Now is the time novice pilots
plunge into the ocean I didn’t mean to
wake up here bobbing with harbor seals
staring as usual with no discretion They keep
the data in their silver brains insulated
like a coin collection 5th– and 6th-century
Byzantine I have to believe I’m the person
I’ve been seeking It’s easier and harder
to imagine under the severity of pressure I’ll
soon black out Float away from this failing
sky before it hits the pitch Now to re-set
all my declines before the water ages
silver under all this barometric pressure
No hard feelings No difficult feelings
_____________________
Oni Buchanan
Review by Alan Gold
The construction of this poem is wonderful. The “silver boundary” between ascent and decline, the passage into “silvered” old age, is a hard line here. It’s not subtle. You crash into it, and then you must deal with your own slow sinking. That hard line shows up metaphorically (it is indeed difficult for novice pilots to negotiate that horizon line). But it also shows up literally, in the hard vertical line between the two halves of the poem. I’m not always a fan of shape or pattern poetry but this really works.