To the Greenland Shark
You loom like a yawn over blubber plump
pups, those nuggets with red thick hearts
snoozing in grottoes, you stomach
the brush of mammalian fur growing pink
inside you five years, the slow digestion
of things that make cold their god,
that measure worship in years and float
offerings through dark green hallways
What movements of ours set a tingle
in your eggs? Do you feel our stillness now,
as we linger in living rooms, outlast
a beast that bounces merry as a bee between us,
young as a pink soap bubble? What is death
on your slow velvet journey? The Inuit believe
you swim in the toilet water of a goddess,
a phantom of piss drifting in icy waste.
Down where skeletons tatter and fold,
where ships dribble past like celestial drops,
can you remember a silence emerald dense
or the glacier’s silver lyric waving wide?
I’d watch you glide by my window like a heron
if it meant I’d keep this body. I’d pray
to the meat in your teeth if I could bite
my lover’s ear in twenty-three hundred,
see my baby’s baby turning seventy swathed
in the purling navy of your heaven.
pups, those nuggets with red thick hearts
snoozing in grottoes, you stomach
the brush of mammalian fur growing pink
inside you five years, the slow digestion
of things that make cold their god,
that measure worship in years and float
offerings through dark green hallways
What movements of ours set a tingle
in your eggs? Do you feel our stillness now,
as we linger in living rooms, outlast
a beast that bounces merry as a bee between us,
young as a pink soap bubble? What is death
on your slow velvet journey? The Inuit believe
you swim in the toilet water of a goddess,
a phantom of piss drifting in icy waste.
Down where skeletons tatter and fold,
where ships dribble past like celestial drops,
can you remember a silence emerald dense
or the glacier’s silver lyric waving wide?
I’d watch you glide by my window like a heron
if it meant I’d keep this body. I’d pray
to the meat in your teeth if I could bite
my lover’s ear in twenty-three hundred,
see my baby’s baby turning seventy swathed
in the purling navy of your heaven.
January / February 2023
Dorsey Craft is the author of Plunder (Bauhan Publishing 2020), winner of the May Sarton NH Poetry Prize. Her work has received support from the Anderson Center at Tower View and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. She currently serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at Agni and teaches at Florida State University.