Another legend that surrounds the solstice involves fairies. On December 21st, the fairies of the world come out in the moonlight to play and dance. I'm not sure if they leave presents for children or kidnap/kill them. Think Rossetti's Goblin Market. I had a friend who used to hang cookies in trees for the fairies on the winter solstice.
Tonight, my poem is about a creature that could legend. The giant lake sturgeon. It's one of my better known works and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize when it was first published.
The Ugliest Fish in North America
by: Martin Achatz
for Lydia
The mother
worries about DNA, how helix
Can twist,
like shadows on bedroom walls,
Into
something terrifying, tree into banshee,
Chair into
dragon, son into a person
She’d
avoid on street corners, thin
As a blade
of grass, arms full of purple
Canals, a
universe of scabby stars.
She
wonders how the collision of egg
With sperm
inside her belly created
This
creature so drawn to the smell
Of carbon
monoxide, the taste of razor.
From where
in the evolution of family
Did this
vestigial finger or toe of insanity
Come? Was it grandpa from Buffalo,
Who got
drunk at Niagara Falls, walked
The
railing like a Wallenda, one arm
Stretched
toward his new bride,
The other
toward thunder, mist, oblivion?
Was it
great grandma from Russia,
Who buried
two daughters in wheat
Fields
before they could suckle because
They were
daughters, couldn’t work the earth
From rock
and frost into mud, into yam,
Corn,
cabbage? Or was it someone she
Didn’t
know, someone further than memory,
Who
planted this seed in her tree,
This son
flower who now fills her pillows
With the
wail of loon over moon and lake?
One day
when she was a girl, she stood
In the
shallows of Superior, her body just
A promise
of woman, mother. She felt
A monster
slide by her in the water,
Larger
than her father, a freight, all
Cartilage
and fin, scute and armor,
A live
fossil against her skin. She reached
out,
Touched
its flank, her fingers connected
To a thing
ancient: carnosaurus, tarbosaurus,
Pteranodon. It moved slower than glacier,
Gave her
time to know its prehistoric form,
Shape
unchanged by seventy million years
Of spawn
and weed, the skim for minnow,
Mayfly,
mosquito. As a girl, the mother
Didn’t
fear this car of a fish, instead accepted
Its
presence as blessing, Paraclete, spirit
To pass on
to her mother, father, mate, child.
Beside her
son’s hospital bed today, she watches
Him,
counts his breaths, wants to press
Her thumb
to the flutter in his wrist.
She thinks
of Longfellow’s hero, swallowed
By the
sturgeon, crawling down its throat,
Through
rib, toward the drumming darkness.
She closes
her eyes, wraps her arms around
Nahma’s
great heart, lets it throb, convulse
Against
her face and breasts, hears blood
Roaring in
and out, to gill, brain, nose, tail.
She holds
on the way she wants to now hold
Her
son. To save him, reverse Darwin,
genetics.
Force Him
backwards to the time when his life
Was still
cretaceous, a mystery. A shining,
Black egg
in the vast water of her womb.
Please vote for Saint Marty:
Voting for next Poet Laureate of the U. P.
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