Nick Rattner
​

Pic of us at Rockaway

We stand next to winter
waves to memorize their roar,
small stones in the blue
dreaming themselves backwards.
I want to say a deity dwelled
in that mine of churning stone,
that we could smell hooves
and hair in the mineral and
bitumen brine, taste the sweat
of winter sun.
I want to say in November
the Atlantic’s lip was indigo,
but it was colder than indigo.
Gray of uncrushed granite
when we took deep breaths
and lunged into the dying god’s
luminescent mind.
Prototype for the eruption of melancholy

                        – taken from an interview with Adam Purple about his
                           Garden of Eden, formerly on Manhattan’s Lower East Side,
                           demolished in 1986

                formed bed widths
and lengths equal

to a rake’s handle;
surplus whole bricks

sold for 25¢ each;
generated potash

from unpainted
burnt wood; with a bike,

carried back carriage-
horse manure, filling

concentric broken-
circle beds, flowering

Euclideans of stone;
            sifted rubble

for the gravel wheel of paths,

salvaged galvanized
sheet metal;

             for gaps: sand–

dragged mattress springs back

for a Connecticut dry stone
wall, curling non-enclosure –

then,

           sweet alyssum

walking sticks, praying
mantises, snakes, brown

thrushes, bees in black
​
walnut, purple basil below
a Chinese Empress

sharing a spoke near
the center of a labyrinth

on the Lower East Side,
​
Green Ash opening

in leaves that wheel,
                                             again,
                         spin.
--
Nick Rattner has served as Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast and as Editor for Ugly Duckling Presse. Recent work has appeared in / will soon appear in Fence, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Sixth Finch, Pleiades, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill, and Asymptote. At present, he is translating the work of Spanish poet Juan Andrés García Román, with the recent chapbook Little Songs (2022) from Foundlings Press and a forthcoming book The Adoration (2023) from Quantum Prose, for which he was awarded a grant from Spain’s Ministry of Education.