Blue Pearl Peak by Gary Aro Ruble
Bev Braune
The Witch of Far-Away
The witch has cut us brooms
of ice.
From a Bessarabian rug
she watches us lose height.
As we dip we hear her far-away voice—
chants to bring the roof of the sky
to the floor of brilliant summers,
to raise galleons from her palms
straight from the smoking harbour
to steepled gables.
As we plummet
we smell soil deserted by rain
in a way we never have before—
dripping hulls and tilted decks
bring high-up places to sleep on broken clay;
we see prophets threaten to set clouds off-shore,
lift banks from our melting skins,
thread anchors to our entrails
and set us to sea as weather-vanes in a flood.
Mussel-ground
At the first bridge: we are
in sight of mussel-ground.
The garden breaks into a beach: salt, black sand,
split shells plunder the wind.
From ships with bellies buried in a harbour,
two ancient seamen standing their tallest to a man’s knee
help a sailor’s soul leap the rails of a wreck.
They drape his bones over a rusty bar and plant roses
where his tongue used to be
so that others will not forget his alive-voice.
The one with the blacker and crinklier hair
argues for the sailor’s right to be given the shortest trip
to the paradise of salt-wells:
it is difficult for them to agree—
the first, looking up to the sky through a lock of hair,
senses someone who died in waiting for the sailor’s return
and, waiting still, has discovered the paradise of waits;
the second nods but makes the point that waiting is its own promise
and that no bargain need be made with her.
They watch the old bones take to the wind;
they watch for the moment
when the sailor’s tongue also remembers its voice,
for it is here the two come to agreement:
that the man who once marked the distance of the sea in bells
would best be happy where old echoes of his heart
are set to the marking of buoys.
Bio:
Bev Braune's poetry collections are Dream Diary (Savacou, 1982) and Camouflage (Bloodaxe /Dufour Editions, 1998). Her areas of interest are poetics and Aesthetics (philosophy of the literary work of art), the poetry of the ancient Americas and Old Norse/Old Icelandic poetry. Bev Braune lives in Sydney, Australia, where she is working on the volumes of the epic poem Skulváói Úlfr. She holds a doctorate from the University of Wollongong for creative and scholarly work in poetry.
