I don’t know how I feel about so many masters
painting me that stupid blue and calm
as if I were not all salt fish shit and whale scum
Doldrums Lunar collaborations Tradewinds
and crosscurrents In your language when you say
titanic colossal to grasp my vastness
so do you measure my indifference
to slaughter What
you really mean to say is deadly Haven’t you
heard me lower my voice
to lull the sentries and charm the kingmakers
and widows Even in the Beginning
when it was just me and the bird and the sky
I didn’t sing just one dumb note Poets
love to chart those darling maps of me
with their petty thirst gazing from the coastline
counting the seashells each pink blip simple
and shining in the sand like a multitude of scars
If all my admirers could tell the difference
between righteousness and ruin
they’d do well to bear witness to the saved
how they shut their ears and eyes
when their cousins drown Those little gasps
and sweet orgasmic murmurs
Oh there’s evidence But who of you has the time
or courage to look Go ahead and try
Catalog the millions of miles corroded and crystalline
I’m not a God or a mother I’m a goddamned thief
No one knows my real name I’m so deep
you’ll spend generations trying to find the bones
Patrick Rosal is an interdisciplinary artist and author. He has earned fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the Fulbright Senior Research Program. A professor of English and founding Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at
Rutgers-Camden, he is designer and coordinator of Quilting Water, an international documentary art project around race and ecology. His newest collection, The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems, will be published in 2021.
