Clade Song 14

Asterozoa

That lovely name, “brittle star,” although memories
are all of the ordinary, fleshy kind, in various
pastel shades, piled all one on top of the other
in cold-water tidepools, or stranded, solitary,
on beaches, perhaps not even alive any more,
but retaining some sense of the musculature
radiating out to limb-tips from an all-purpose
orifice, an entire body organized
around grasping things, hard, to that aperture,
again and again, as the watery ceiling wavers
and here are two pairs of ankles, a son, a mother,
picking their way along the thin fringe of shore,
stirring up entire sand-galaxies, their slow turn around
something black, impossibly dense, beyond words.

Ben Corvo (https://www.bencorvopoet.org/) Strands of memory can span a planet—gaps in webbed fruit groves on a Mediterranean coastal plain, as I pushed inland on a solitary all-night hike; the O of my sleeping father’s mouth. It was some thirteen years ago, my father had just started chemo, we were sharing a motel room just outside Yosemite. He was still strong then. I listened to the moist rattle for a little while, then got up in the early-morning stillness, clambered down the rocks beyond the parking lot to the river, immersed myself, did the morning devotions.

Now I am half a planet away again. My father passed away just under a year ago. The animal sound of his breathing is everywhere.

Ben Corvo's work has appeared previously in Salmagundi, Magma, The Tel Aviv Review of Books, and other journals in the US, UK, and Israel.