r.kv.r.y quarterly summer 2006 poetry by Richard Wirick
CROCODILE
The cayman that’s behind you
makes no noise before he kills.
He breaks your curious neck
with the flat of his five foot
bird-thin jaws
and drags you to a thatch of
half-sunk mangrove roots in
the rapids’ whirlpool path,
so hair and clothes drift off
the flesh, that roasts by turns
of its own weight in the heavy
wall of sun and steaming air.
A week, two weeks of eating
for its squirming, owl-eyed,
white and hungry young.
What’s left of you are what
the Anu call the ‘forest’s
necklaces’:
cracked spines and clutching
metacarpals, sodden, water-
logged, but still bleach-bright
in the blackest branches.
The cayman that’s behind you
makes no noise before he kills.
He breaks your curious neck
with the flat of his five foot
bird-thin jaws
and drags you to a thatch of
half-sunk mangrove roots in
the rapids’ whirlpool path,
so hair and clothes drift off
the flesh, that roasts by turns
of its own weight in the heavy
wall of sun and steaming air.
A week, two weeks of eating
for its squirming, owl-eyed,
white and hungry young.
What’s left of you are what
the Anu call the ‘forest’s
necklaces’:
cracked spines and clutching
metacarpals, sodden, water-
logged, but still bleach-bright
in the blackest branches.
BRIDGE JUMPER, 1977
“When I was up
in the air I knew
that everything
in my life could still
be fixed except
what I’d just done.”
he said on the deck
of the Coast Guard boat,
all of the bones
of his doomed-to-go-
on-living body broken:
Twenty stories through
The same world’s new world’s air.
All around him all
That unmindfully
Buffered the void:
Great speckled gulls,
a cliff of trees,
acres and acres
of sparkling foam.
“When I was up
in the air I knew
that everything
in my life could still
be fixed except
what I’d just done.”
he said on the deck
of the Coast Guard boat,
all of the bones
of his doomed-to-go-
on-living body broken:
Twenty stories through
The same world’s new world’s air.
All around him all
That unmindfully
Buffered the void:
Great speckled gulls,
a cliff of trees,
acres and acres
of sparkling foam.
