| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
CONCEPTIONS
Knut Skagen
(The Melic Review)
Blekinge, Sweden, 2004
We found ourselves a beach.
A dirt road swirls right down to the sands
but we park and walk the last half-mile.
It’s not a sunny day, but here we are,
the best we could make of it. My son and I
name flowers we haven’t seen before—
starsweep, yellowbrush—
and pick the berries we have.
I show him how raspberries have thorns.
He asks me again. “What are thorns?”
*
Hospital things are green. Yours is a thermometer,
a staple in the mouth every dawn, stony-faced
until the satisfaction of a beep. We make love
and I imagine it has taken root inside of you,
recording your flutters of pulse and ecstasy,
like all our sex is really for somebody else.
*
Clouds conceal the passing of time,
the long light and sun’s invisible trace
creating their own eternity in spe. One evening
the underbrush exhaled mist, the sea
erased itself against the whitening sky,
the seams between things unspun
into a blank horizon, and only the reeds
and fine strips of muddied sand between us
and that void. We live off air and water, after all;
is it so strange to see ourselves caught
in their fluid escape? Even while we stand
on the bank, blood-heat courting mosquitoes.
Were I to dress myself in that silver,
where would it end?
*
After lunch (sand gets in our bread) the sea
turns red. Algae come in from the Baltic;
not jellyfish at least. A large bird flaps overhead, so I point.
“Look, a stork!,” because we’ve told him about storks,
how they used to drop babies Santa Claus-style
down the chimney, but I think it’s most likely a heron.
Judge C.J. Sage’s comments: “‘Conceptions’ is an interesting piece with a strong ending. I would only encourage the writer to make more clear the differentiation between the ‘son’ in the first section and the person to whom the speaker is making love in the second section. Obviously, they are not the same, but it reads sort of like that.”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
3rd Place Winner, August 2004
