Aquamarine Sestina                  

Dried, prepared sea monsters viewed under glass

at the museum. Beyond the city tentacles feel through water.

Kelp floats like handkerchiefs, sea cucumbers undulating across sand.

You can see an octopus’ ghostly shape through the depth under waves

A cruise ship passes the beach, and people wave along the shore. 

The sun is coming up and the horizon looks infinite.

 

I wake up and pour myself a glass

of water.

I leave the hotel room, lie down on the sand

and fix my eyes on the shore.

I drift into sleep—the infinite

of dreams, the crashing of waves.

 

We stand on the shore

and look into the infinite.

The universe’s mystery feels like glass

as anger, disappointment, and sadness flow  in rivulets through wet sand,

dissolving into waves,

traveling into the receding tide and currents of water.

 

You can see algae under waves

and jellyfish that move like undulating glass

beyond life and death, transcending shores,

thinking about the problem of trying to examine the infinite,  

released from the mind in drifting water,

as you see children on the beach playing in the sand.

 

My art teacher Peggy Ward painted the shore

and she introduced me to Aquamarine—that water-

color pigment. Now Peggy has entered the infinite,

and so has my mom, space like layers of glass,

and the cries of mourners like waves

roll like skirts of foam and pull sand

 

back into the ocean water,

past the crepuscular shore,

and the night sky like black glass

with its field of stars like bright sand

will take us into the infinite

before or after tomorrow’s sunrise on waves.

 

Waves upon water

upon sand—antecedents of glass—

upon shores of the infinite.

Remember

 

Remember the chili she used to make, the medisterpolse

& aebleskivers. Remember the scarves and sweaters

she knitted, the babies she held. Remember the problems

with her rotator cuffs, the bone spurs, the fallen arches,

the operations, her faltering gait, the stumbles, the falls

and atrophying muscles. Remember how much she loved

to talk and visit, and then how the disease made her speech

slur and then robbed her of her ability to talk, but then

she continued to talk with her eyes. Remember the atrophied muscles, her cold

hands that could no longer grip,

the agony in her eyes, her fierce love of life, her determination

to live another day, then her acceptance of her own mortality. Remember how

much we tried to help her, how slippery

and stealthily the disease moved, how friends and family came together. Do you

remember the moment before it’s gone?

 

 

 Glyph              

 

Ambulatory, not so easy. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis onset,

so wheelchair-bound Mingus and his wife Sue traveled to Mexico

for treatment. You can say it again so you can face what

the words mean. Aelatoric music mingled

with canaries’ butter churns. Baffles in rainsticks, rascals scallions’

barfly. Drastic canyon ziplocked Hades’ hunger.

 

Is every canard not caca? Debut Records wouldn’t be shunted,

so the Jazz Rebels showed Newport where to stick it. Don’t mess

with Mingus. Don’t evaporate flippers. Never pilfer pavement,

flimflam filthy dodgers, moonpie funny money with fungus

among us. Gyrate hydrated hemisphere, coned gimlet stem.

Ashes into the Ganges. Harry Who hammered Ignatius J. Reilly’s hotdogs,

 

so don’t blame Karl Wirsum. I know mango jelly, you know

mangled bumbershoot jujubes, we know Mr. Mumbles scats

cirrus clouds. The linear descent jammed into the syntactic

metamorphosis derived from L’s elbow. Then L broke its elbow

and lower and upper case I’s walked away without walkers.

Lora Logic licked her saxophone reed and lowered a skronk

 

wail into the scooped out punk ditch. Just because the letter M

is a V on crutches doesn’t mean it should be shunned.

The proto-Sinaitic waves now move very watery, and then you get N,

the two-headed mouth monster. Nun none uou oho yoyo oy vey

vexing Tex Mex warbled marble. Ornery pickles query plangent strata.

Platypus quibbles with strapping tarnish. Poly Styrene’s

 

paradiddle clipped safety pinned Thatcher gunk. Strip ravioli

knuckleheads bandaged up in kludgy curves. Telemarketers never

have the wrong number. The bummer’s haywire,

switching station backed into pitch black parks. The tryst unzipped

the zenith, and the avalanche veered around Discord Records,

slalomed around SST, careening toward the vortex

 

of Mr. Hi Hat’s gravitational pull. Theresa Nervosa never

verified the moment the snare snap busted the pickup

& unvarnished plywood stage. He tried to convalesce

in Cuernavaca, but death took him away. No need

to shy away from Mom’s marvel. Zing zam boom,

yellow fish fumble through X-Ray Spex’s razzamatazz.

© Daniel Godston

Bio: Daniel Godston teaches and lives in Chicago. His writings have appeared in Chase Park, After Hours, Versal, Drunken Boat, 580 Split, Kyoto Journal, Eratica, The Smoking Poet, Horse Less Review, Apparatus Magazine, and other print publications and online journals. His poem “Mask to Skin to Blood to Heart to Bone and Back” was nominated by the editors of 580 Split for the Pushcart Prize. He also composes and performs music, and he works with the Borderbend Arts Collective to organize the annual Chicago Calling Arts Festival.