Lori Lamothe
Glassmaker’s Travel Diary
after Leopold Blaschka
Grief doesn’t bloom/doesn’t float but falls/shedding
stillness until it touches black/the ship motionless
on a mirror sea/becalmed a word for a state of mind
that might mean trapped/might mean caught in
an absence of wind/yellow fever took my wife/
my father dead too/America an idea on the other
side of waiting/at night the sea creatures rise up
onto my sketch pad/swim across my eyelids/when
I get back I’ll turn them into light/dip memory
in melted sand/memory a word that should
mean forever but doesn’t/the color of her eyes
wavers/the shade of her hair in summer/my father
wearing a suit and folded arms/becomes watercolor/
his voice lost in breaking waves/the jellyfish glow
translucent as they disappear/when I get back
I won’t let them go/because replica is a word for
a state of being so strange/it can live at depths
where mortality is only a loose net of syllables.
Grief doesn’t bloom/doesn’t float but falls/shedding
stillness until it touches black/the ship motionless
on a mirror sea/becalmed a word for a state of mind
that might mean trapped/might mean caught in
an absence of wind/yellow fever took my wife/
my father dead too/America an idea on the other
side of waiting/at night the sea creatures rise up
onto my sketch pad/swim across my eyelids/when
I get back I’ll turn them into light/dip memory
in melted sand/memory a word that should
mean forever but doesn’t/the color of her eyes
wavers/the shade of her hair in summer/my father
wearing a suit and folded arms/becomes watercolor/
his voice lost in breaking waves/the jellyfish glow
translucent as they disappear/when I get back
I won’t let them go/because replica is a word for
a state of being so strange/it can live at depths
where mortality is only a loose net of syllables.
--
Lori Lamothe is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Kirlian Effect (FutureCycle, 2017). Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Calyx, The Journal, Verse Daily and elsewhere.