Acqua Alta, and: The Pot of Basil
Rent from DeepDyve- Acqua Alta, and: The Pot of Basil
Acqua Alta
In the shadow you castA pool slowly recedingAs the high water withdrew.Inside two crabs are still.Many people have passedWithout stopping or seeing.
After moving your shadowYou ask if a local willPut them in the seaBefore they're left to dieDeserted—high and dry.
When the Venetian seizesThe larger carapaceThe mother crab's clawsAre lifted from its youngBut there's a quandary:Either hold the infantOr protect itself.It grasps the little one.
With memories of rainWe are made to learnThat self-preservationIs not the law of laws,That waters return again [End Page 117]
Toward the flooded drain.A branch of the covenantDamned and heaven-sent.
The Pot of Basil
Severing makes us remember and forget:Ten years ago the heat never seemed to liftAs we lay beneath our draped mosquito netAnd an old air conditioner seemed a gift.Now again, heat and the mosquitoes (alwaysPresent, even in winter) are pestilential.Only in late afternoon, a breeze playsIn the trees and over the body penitential(Isabella suffiering love and strife).Out of nowhere, a bell rings and is doneIn still air, another anomalous sign of life.A shutter opens to the oblique sun.In the Arab window there's a basil plantTo say I will and want to leave, but can't. [End Page 118]
Jefferson Holdridge, professor of English at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, is the author of three volumes of poetry, most recently The Sound Thereof (Graft Poetry). He has written two critical books, one on W. B. Yeats and another on Paul Muldoon, and has edited two volumes of The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry (Wake Forest University Press), as well as Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry, with Brian Ó Conchubhair (WFU Press).
