The Circle of the Fifths
The work tastes overwhelmed, like alert palms flanking a full highway.
How you find the grit later in your mouth & wake into
your own enormity. How the work takes an unexpected amount of right turns
that run into the darkness & peter out under abandoned bridges.
To the Massachusetts from which I come, my brother-country racked by cobblestones
that left me sprained, I leave my brain
infused with slick bottom stones where three rivers converge. Men in hip-boots
pull breaching trout from the surface.
The work is as barbarous as bookends. Waterspouts deviated by a tough wind,
as if we could jump up into our wings, hold a pitch to the point of ownership
& scatter as sure as light.
Though I was willingly broken by the grandeur, I made not one exception,
too taken by a trumpet taking stabs at Gershwin, the faults repeats passing
in on a breeze. Yet I was often awakened by a horrid kind of surprise
into my primary image (a small brook that borders a deaf school).
Having worked a summer holiday for belladonna, I thought my sight was proof.
I believed all the endings curved into the choirmaster’s slender fingers
which formed a closed circle against the darkened faces of the crowd.
Yet I stared at a map for a year & could only remember the colors of countries.
The work followed me like the carcasses of road-kill I counted while passing
through Colorado. Two days in, the toll mounted to unhumorous heights. 284
was lifted from the asphalt by a hawk just before the grill of the car. The work
was like that, both skyward and lifeless.
—Catherine Meng
About the Author
Catherine Meng's poems have appeared in Crowd, Moist Towelette, and Slope.
