Katia Grubisic: PARADISE, DAM, NORTH SHORE

Katia Grubisic

PARADISE, DAM, NORTH SHORE

It prods with its beak

the heaving flanks, lets the fish wait

for death. The heron too waits. Its feet wrap the rock

like gnarled lichen and its breath rises

and ends someplace deep and slow. Desire

is a vertiginous warmth spread slowly;

has it really to do with hunger? I trace

circles on the shale, my scratch

in this ordinary riparian melodrama: the dammed river,

the rapids’ patient frenzy, the black-capped night herons

lined up on the shore, poised, eager and pathetic

but the one who gets it is the great grey-blue,

who dips in and spears the carp,

forces the skin apart, slits it like a mouth

before swallowing it whole. There is no forethought

to concupiscence. We are thinking

of paradise, which is not thinking at all.

We like the enfolding conflagration, we like

swallowing it whole. Later I will barely recall

that moment’s mindless hunt

as I push against my lover, not telling

of the flat, fat, silvery body

pulsing at the mouth of its captor.

from What if red ran out. Goose Lane Editions, 2008. First published in The Fiddlehead, 235.

Read my conversation with Katia Grubisic here.