What I Have Never Forgotten
by Nancy Himel
– A “Golden Shovel” based on the last lines in
Mark Doty’s “A Green Crab’s Shell”
are the cracks in the
color that shiver in shadow, the stillness that
is the world steeled from love
the secrets never afraid to seek shimmer in the
underside of snow, the secrets etched in shades
of gray stolen from squirrels harboring
skin in holes that fill with sand and sink my feet but do
not topple. I have never forgotten the offers of oxygen
so those close to howling at God’s nearing voice, their
bad breath ready to set air asunder but without words
to say let us begin to build a blackness, a willingness to
die, to name the forecast, to dine on death and quietly go.
If I could slide every offense out to sea, if
we could flatten discourse, theirs and our own, if we
could release the blame, wait again for words to
be metaphors of mouth and heart
opened to breaking barriers, to turning compost
into love, a sudden shiver could descend upon all
this earth, a caress of clearing wind, of bluing quiet as
if the world had sunk into naptime, replaced riptides with
the sparkle of rain that sets the dust down into the
smallest cracks of crust and gravel, into the
chambers, the roots of the centuries that made us
of light and glow and grace, gave us the gift to grow
ourselves into always better beings
similarly endowed in fragmented temper seldom
revealed yet always revealing we are made of magic
some stuck in it, some stretching up through
sky transparent, always capable of glow.
