after a painting of the same title by Mark Bradford
how calm it feels
inside the white box
before the floodplain
the warped water
whose fine striations
trace the levy’s grip
as it frays
into the scrawl
of an ever-
maddening tide
syncopating
Turner’s more antique
anxieties
expelling his
tight-oiled gulls
¯ that raven the drowning
and the drowned:
this
a contradiction
of that
¯ olive swell,
that battering amaranth:
this aerial
hallucination—
¯ America lies
flat
as a pennywrapper,
America un-
conscienced as memorial—
to see if one sees at all
firestamps mark up
¯ a map of the dying
and blistering bright
pocked oceanic fields
hold
each body like a pearl: no
slavers’ masts
¯ scored into the storm
nor leviathan’s pretty lips
nor black chains raised
over the breakers
nor the tangerine sun
like a bomb:
¯ instead this
tremulous bliss of
silver and slate
¯ like a radio left on
repeating their names until
Nina lands the beat
with her teeth:
Can’t you see it?
Can’t you feel it?
First appeared in the journal Public Pool in August 2016