Remains, by Deborah Bachels Schmidt

Gray Whale, Limantour, by Mark Bremer (USA) contemporary

 
Remains
 
I ache to live as poets past could live,
to “live gladly” in the presence of
“the enormous invulnerable beauty of things.”
 
I long to celebrate this great whale skeleton,
this architecture of vertebrae
graduated like cathedral columns
or the thick-wound bass strings of a sunken harp,
 
receding with the measured rhythm of an unsung hymn,
sinking like a fallen tree into the earth, into the sea again,
still wearing textured ravelings of skin, 
revealing kinship, in its mighty decomposition,
with our own furred bodies.
 
We late poets are so confused by all this misplaced splendor
–a spring-like February day, a lone monarch.
These whale bones on the beach stir fears
about warming seas, starving pods,
disorienting underwater explosions.
“We are fools,” Jeffers believed,
 
“If we refuse the inhuman beauty, to chase our own minds and make
…abstractions, 
Which are meaner and easier–”
A century later, we are called to perhaps an even harder
balancing act than his, the soul-lacerating pain
of owning the destruction we have wrought
while at the same time holding and loving 
 
what is still so beautiful.
 
Deborah Bachels Schmidt

Quotes are from Robinson Jeffers’ “Nova” and a draft of “The Ocean’s Tribute.”

This poem was first published on the HQ Gallery website.

Deborah Bachels Schmidt has a chapbook, Stumbling Into Grace, forthcoming from Orchard Street Press. Other publication credits include Blue Unicorn, California Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, The Lyric, and The Poeming Pigeon. A Pushcart nominee, she was recently awarded first prize in the Sonnet category at the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition.