Sea Cabbage

Hooked on lovesapple ooze, sea cabbage, salt;
one fragment Whitman penciled,
stage directing his own long lists before logic reconciled
what was stenciled and ambling in his style of everywhere —
lovesapple, like sea-sprawl or beaches that end up
swishing around captive in a box at the Berg Collection
on the third floor, archives shared most unwillingly
with the public ordinaries without institutional credentials,
unless you make a case to bring to the public
sea cabbage of the ocean that wants you in it;
don’t hook your next ten years on lovesapple,
it is nowhere — not in the archives of love and love is not
apple but sweet unwritten fruit that doesn’t know
itself from salt or cabbage or ooze or thought
organized to fill you up; it is written on the page,
scrawled and hopeful, a scrap that wants to feel
pencilmarks make blue a paradise
created and wished for, and something in itself.

ξ

Reading Thom Gunn’s Lament

Four doves flew by
as I approached the window
oblique and shaken, having had a cry
over a lament by a poet, suddenly a widow.

His loss was restless, no repose
for endings, intractable and cruel,
and even then, it took me in, a reprise
of grief uncomprehending, the way it crawls

around you but is nowhere in particular,
finds renewal, and takes some getting used to.
Isn’t it true that absence is a reticulated
presence, its shade the shadow following you?

ξ

Diane Mehta is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Tiny Extravaganzas (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and novel Leaving Malabar Hill (OR Books, 2024), and Forest with Castanets (2019). Her work has been recognized by the Peter Heinegg Literary Award, the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, a Kirby-Mewshaw fellowship at Civitella Ranieri, and a fellowship at Yaddo. She was the founding managing editor of A Public Space, launched and edited Glossolalia for PEN America to publish writing from traditionally underrepresented languages, and was executive nonfiction editor for Guernica. She publishes poetry, essays, and criticism for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, American Poetry Review, and A Public Space.