Inferno, by Wendy T. Carlisle

Inferno, Monhegan, Jamie Wyeth, 2006.

Inferno
 
Wherever I halt, before the cliff
 
             amid the birds, their merciless red legs,
             sea-coloured stare,
 
the eye, my eye, returns to specks of flame.
 
Whatever I smell
 
             salt water, guano, garbage, rot,
             the rusty burner or decaying boat
 
the smoke, a shadowed wing, returns to soot.
 
And what I hear, ear tuned to scream
 
            the hubbub of those pirate gulls
            the roar of gas consumed
 
is shriek and tide and bird sucked in to shore.
 
The Bates boy and his oar feed fire’s mouth
 
             beside the effulgent light,
             as if the sea scavenged the sun and spat it back
 
into the foam below a corrugated sky
 
its blue rubbed into gray by a flue-narrowed plume.
 
             The waves, the shoreline, heaps of junk,
             edges incarnate in a black-tipped wing
 
and what returns is brimstone and a swallowing beak.

Wendy T. Carlisle

Wendy Taylor Carlisle is the author of two books and three chapbooks the most recent Persephone on the Metro, (Mad Hat Books, 2014.) See more about her at www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com