Poetry by Beth Kanell

A Sense of Proportion

Each morning I take a walk. The dirt road rising up the ridge

stretches my legs, my aging knees, the lazy lower lungs, until

the rest of me—strength, courage, persistence—wakes up. Clouds

call for attention. Fragrances of cedar and spruce and wet soil

remind me: this body

holds and irrigates a brain, which sizzles, struggles, survives.

Yesterday’s grief grows no larger today. Face your challenges,

I tell myself, there’s good work ahead. When a chunk of white quartz

teases my left foot, I accept its offer, pick it up, carry this

reminder, because it can be

nearly two billion years old. Nothing I wrestle with compares

to a thousand times a thousand times a thousand, which is what

one billion means. Walk it down a dimension: The Strait of Hormuz

with its steep rock cliffs, its coastline pierced by mysterious valley,

formed a mere thirty-five million years ago

—mere? I write the line of zeroes, picture continental plates

sliding, colliding—what I recall of Persian history, of Greek gods,

the heroic and profitable sailing ships, it’s all slipping toward

this new fractured moment on the cliff edge of world war,

fragile within each day’s news.

Back up, I tell myself. Get some proportion. Fifty-five million

years ago, Sirenians evolved—water versions of gray elephants,

plant eaters, massive, the manatee and the dugong. There are about

seven thousand dugongs in the Strait of Hormuz, sleepy eyes,

childlike nostrils just above the surface

lazing in warm coastal waters. See where my chunk of quartz has led:

from sharp-edged crystal, to distant ocean, to ten-foot-long dugongs

I’ll never see in person. Dugongs had a Russian cousin, but the sea cow

dropped into extinction in twenty-seven years of hunting. When I reach

the end of my walk, I’m still

wondering about Sirenians. How many will vanish, if one mine explodes

in the newsworthy Strait of Hormuz? Breakfast cannot dispel grief,

though it’s anticipatory, future-led, off the timescale in the other direction—

the dugongs may survive. The pearl mussels? The seagrass? Quartz,

my question. A pebble in proportion.

Moonshot as She Finishes Radiation

Goodbye, goodbye. The “facts of life” are strange: not

so much the bodily positions that follow deep kisses, the force

surging, demanding a conjunction of parts and galaxies—

fold along the dotted line, insert penis or tongue here—

remember instead the po’faced embryo, eyes sealed,

mouth not yet craving salt, drifting weightless on its cord

of oxygen and pulse. I think of those four astronauts

(did you watch him lie on air? notice how her hair

drifted free in weightless delight?) tethered and tech’d

witnessing Earthrise for the first time. I suspect that each,

wedding ring or not, tends a long strand of connection

unreleased, unrelenting, distant prayer cupped around

fierce throbbing muscle in the chest. Outer-space bond

weightless as bodies, potent as umbilical. My mother said

if there is no fertilized egg implanting, the uterine lining

sloughs off: pours in five-day flood between your

thighs, and that’s the end for another month. We watched

Christa McAuliffe’s cells disperse in flame, in smoke,

toward galaxies only numbered, not named. Hic transit

Ovum Five Hundred, last potent dwarf star (very dwarf)

wishful, “I could have been your child.” Etymology

frustrates me, the mystic trembling curtains of menopause

undecorated by the sparkle of painted fingernails. Tiny

babies have tinier fingernails; some books tell the parent

“nibble the sharp edge away, safer than scissors”—love

intensified, exploding in the heart, dust of a secret galaxy

silent and glowing. Radiation pulses and enters, no,

has entered, those dim red passages within. Perhaps today

the last cancer cell rolls onto its back and dissolves. Perhaps

that happened last week, and today’s energy beam sears,

scorches, along a lovely line of vacancy. Goodbye, to the

technician who coaxes gently; goodbye, massive machine

carrying death and life aimed in fierce accurate arrows.

Goodbye, little cells who struggled urgently to multiply

and divide. Here is the math of zero, which is, of course,

infinity inverted. The space capsule spinning; interior

as free as flesh could ever long to be.