Erick Verran

Ikebana

               The clock covers its face with long, thin hands
                                              —Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Tonight, I finally managed to ask
my mother (delicately, I think)
whether she has begun to arrange
her affairs. Supposedly, AARP
is running an end-of-the-year sale
on last wills and testaments.
Cannot the dying still appreciate
a coupon? I try distracting myself
with others’ words only to find
bitter significance. (“Beauty
is generally assumed to be a natural
endowment, as undeserved
as cancer.”) A videographer I met
in Oaxaca shared the trailer
to a film about Día de los Muertos.
It opens on marigold farmers;
one poses in his white T-shirt,
a sickle hanging from his shoulder.
Sunlight behind a warped door.
In Japanese aesthetics, “the concept
of Ma refers to a pause in time,
an interval or emptiness in space.”
If I put off watering thoughts
it is as though elsewhere a flower
begins wilting.

Frogman

My father’s life worsens slowly. In the junior navy,
each recruit was given a wetsuit and tools

for tactical scuba diving, underwater demolition.

It’s what they used to call frogmen.
He explains that, when sneaking up on the enemy,
you first slit his throat (so he can’t yell) before knifing
the heart.                                                                        

My father says he must be really strong,
given everything that hasn’t killed him: two tours of war,
the divorces, except misery caught him off guard

in the long run.                                                      
Like the tip everybody knows
about cooking a frog, how you modulate the flame
quarter turns at a time, regular as a clock,

such that the frog doesn’t notice
the stainless-steel’s clear, lethal heat and jump free.

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