Little seahorse
Swimming in a primal sea
Heartbeat like a
Leaf quaking in the breeze
I feel magic as coyote
In the middle of the moon-wild night
In the forge-fire time
Your mother glowed so bright
You were like a
Voice calling in the night
And I'm watching the curtain
Rising on a whole new set of dreams
The world is waiting
Like a Lake Superior gale
A locomotive
Racing along the rail.
It'll sweep you away
But you know that you're never alone
Little seahorse
Floating on a primal tide
Quickening like a
Spark in a haystack side
I already love you
And I don't even know who you are
When I was driving home yesterday evening I heard the winning poem on CBC’s annual poetry contest and it’s wonderful. Written by Mark Wagenaar, the poem “String Theory” expresses, among other things, that sense of expectation when you feel the child’s heartbeat for the first time. Jenny and I had our babies before ultrasound pictures could be stuck on fridge doors, but that is part of that same anticipation and wonder. I love his lines, “So who sang us/into being, who first struck our hearts into rivering/with a few slides along the strings?” He captures the love, the magic and the mystery and how all of that is tied to the rest of our story.
String Theory
You should know how to jump a car,
& how to change a tire, my father once told me.
To that I'd add where to buy the best shine
in town, which is always out of someone's trunk.
In Oxford, look for an '89 Cherokee,
rust-mottled white, & tinted dark as ink,
because a woman named Chaz will sell a jelly jar
with hardly a charcoal speck. She's an adherent
of string theory - not the one that says strings
send their 2-D worldsheet through spacetime,
one candidate for The Theory of Everything -
but the shine version: she plays an old violin
in a barn to the sealed jars, & a horse, Bill.
They don't have ears, she says, maybe the vibrations
soften the shine some. She's got her own set
of must-knows: how to make an easy grand
hauling cigarettes across state lines, how to grow
your own blue corn for the stuff. How to kick
the other stuff, blue flame, burn spoon, dying horse
or heroin, the appetite goes first, she says.
You should know what it's like to bury
a horse, to spend a morning digging a piano-size
grave, for twenty cents. Three jars in, she tells me
something. We wrapped chains around one
that got stuck in a drinking hole. Her rump in the air,
chunks of horse flesh missing: the coyotes
we'd hear at night as we drifted off to sleep.
When the chains tightened as the tractor heaved
the mare's belly gave, & her body was pulled
from a womb-wet colt. You should know
some things stay with you the rest of your life.
I even saw that colt as I held up the ultrasound
the first time, she says. The birth of your first-born
will wreck every part of you. And I know this.
I've held that picture in my hands. I've even heard
that heart, that stunning wingbeat on the speaker,
that otherworldly whistling, an ambulance passing
by you, if you're stretchered out in the back
at the same time. Like hearing a helicopter
underwater, or talking to a friend on the phone
when he's in freefall. I should know by now I'll never
know all the strings that pull me this way or that.
I mean thirst, & history, mistakes & all, I mean
the way we become our parents, so I know enough
to know I don't know shit, but that heartbeat,
that heartbeat did to me what the late train horn
does to the empty plains, what the blood moon does
to midnight. This week of her first dreams, fingerprints
spiral galaxied into place. Her body in Golden Mean
proportions already, like Chaz's violin - even in her
impossibly small foot, four philines fall at the arch,
ball & base of the toes. Zeising once divided the body
into four zones, & found 3/2 proportion in length,
which is a Perfect Fifth on a scale. So who sang us
into being, who first struck our hearts into rivering
with a few slides along the strings? And this beauty
is an eyelash next to the end we share, so all I see,
& all I hope to see, is a length of days beyond
my own when I look hard at the ultrasound clouds,
at the face upon the waters. The way Chaz looks
at the sun too long sometimes, so the burnspots dance,
then coalesce, until a blueblack colt walks out of the sun.
Mark Wagenaar is the 2015 winner of the Juniper Prize from UMass Press for his second book,The Body Distances (forthcoming spring 2016). His first, Voodoo Inverso, was the 2012 winner of the University of Wisconsin Press' Felix Pollak Prize. His poems appear or are forthcoming fromThe New Yorker, 32 Poems, Field, Southern Review, Image and many others. He is the 2015-16 Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a doctoral fellow at the University of North Texas