Sea Life in St. Mark's Square, and: Baby Boy, Quaryat al Beri
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Sea Life in St. Mark's Square
The fish are visiting sunken cities, the legendary watropolis. They move across brows of mountain ranges, to unlaced canals, above crumbling walls conservators fretted over; where people broke for lunch in a clatter of trattorias,photographed pigeons, or drifted, in love:
one of the first casualties, quick-swamped when the Adriatic bowl overflowed. Now, Cetacean travellers go where no human dared:scale the limpid waters of cathedral domes, blowholes closed until they next break surface. Here, abundance—church-reefs and palaces for purple clams, where sea-anemonae,
corals, also build and bloom, breathy in the light of thick water. Daily visitors arrive from the Barrier Reef, or the Galapagos, porpoises dance and skitter around the lightning conductors of the Campanile, the seals in San Marco tower frolic as,even now, bells attempt sound, a low groan, [End Page 37]
dismal and drowned. New order spider-crab scuttles and flicks on street floors, avoids lurking octopus in a Medici urn,angling for the island of Murano, at one with the colour of silica. In St. Mark's, the basilica crumbles, the ravens have melted in chloride, bromium,
into knots of sea-wrack. Occasional tsunamis affect little, sporting moments for surfing ocean, fringe-footed or finned, as we once did—a memory of ourselves we shall never know, being now microscopic,on the backs of barnacles encrusting the bells.
Baby Boy, Quaryat al Beri
They have left him by my sun-bed,asleep in the shade. His fists are scrolls,eyelashes dense fluttering fans,his chest barely moves.
Mother and grandmother test the shallowsof the inlet, their garments spreading darkly.They dip and manoeuvre, like giant jellyfish.
The young mother smiles back as I peerat her sleeping son. She senses the waftof approval, that unresistant seduction, a babysettled in the globe of another woman's gaze. [End Page 38]
But she cannot know the rest:my imagining of her son,his future privilege.No matter how lowly his birth,there will be women yet lower.
But for now, I too love him, his tight,creamy fists, the quivering brown lashes,that incipient dark brow, eyelidssealed against all divisions,
the hustle, the weighty conscriptionsof his future—to Allah,to another version of this-god,that-god, whatever-god, sun,
moon, crescent and sickle, myriaduniverses, all newly exploded stars,all that he may believe as his by right. [End Page 39]
Mary O'Donnell has published six collections of poetry, most recently The Ark Builders (Arc Publications). She has also written three novels and two short-story collections, has won prizes in the V.S. Pritchett Competition and was the overall winner of the 2010 Fish International Short Story Competition. She is guest poet in the National University of Ireland-Maynooth in the creative writing program.
