Three Poems


By: Nancy Devine






Water Music
Wide ribbons of dead pitched
in the ditch
near the edge of the river on our property: carp, the water’s monsters,
this pool’s bullies,
the indiscriminate gourmands
who swallow walleye fry
and baby bass as benign as the cattails along the shore.

Skewered on spears and abandoned, they roiled
like this river churns up,
flipped and gasped as we have when we're accidentally submerged. They rot with the sun,

becoming altars for horse and deer flies perpetual communion of scale and gill.

When our dog rolls over
and into this mess of mesentery,
his body a pestle in this mortar of sand, a gift of gut in which he wallows,
the smell is so brutal
we curse it as if we don’t know
the fin of finish,
the decomposition of our story.


The Shape of the Liquid the Body Can Displace

As a boy, my husband waded into the St. Croix River like he waded into my life,
a child both times, wily, expectant,
curious about how silt

gives with each step or hugs feet.

Perhaps he loved water sounds:
one perfect H2O molecule nudging
another along shimmering paths between Minnesota and Wisconsin or the shape of the liquid his young body displaced,
a foreshadowing of the man around which air we breathe hovers, moves in.

He didn’t know how to swim.
So when he went too far, got too deep, he went under, he’s told me.

Where he must have seen weeds,
I imagine green flames
or streamers rippling in dark blue wind,
because, one by one,
he grabbed them to pull himself to the other shore across from where his mother had told him to stay.

She has often cautioned
that what first attracts you to someone
is also what angers you most:
water running deep
in bodies we might never completely fill.



Esprit de Corps

My anatomy speaks pain
the way a god coughs up edicts: a slimy trickle along the chin.

My being can tell you hurt
in languages not yet invented and in those that have died, in tongues plaited or braided like a working horse’s tail.

I never dreamed I could know this: an uprising of nerves,
a synaptic coup.
And if I had been armed

with the foreknowledge

of the agony of my own elbows,
knees, scapulae swords sheathed in me, I might’ve lain down
inside my own crying,
as if it were the cave
where women sought the buried Jesus.

Maybe this is about choice;
maybe this is a poem about will. Nonetheless, I move forward now
my body its own whipping post or knot.