Author: Stephen Finlay
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Pádraig Ó Tuama Holds Me in the Bed of the Poem
Pádraig Ó Tuama tells me the person is prayed into being by the direction of the light. At least, I think he says this, but I’m distracted by the soft breath of H that he pushes out from the click of his tongue while we bake scones in the house of the poem, while we…
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Dens of our Grandfathers
Holy colors — deep autumn orange and yellows and reds. I can imagine strapping a crown of twigs to my head, and a mask for my face, and dancing the round dances through fields pregnant with corn and soybeans, until I collapse roadside in spent, orgasmic satiation. A dance of submission, of humble, beseeching desperation…
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Hope
I think of the deadening grass, brown. Full of November. How it lays thick and straight as a thatched roof arching down toward the creek. The sort of roof I marveled over in a book that showed cutaways of castles and homes people lived in centuries ago, when everything was handmade and at least as…
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Freud Considering the Eel
And this is the truth of it: we still don’t know precisely where freshwater eels come from. For 2,500 years scholars had zero luck because eels apparently lacked reproductive organs. Aristotle tried to figure it out. Italian scientists in the 1700s made it a point of national honor. In the late 19th century a graduate…
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Pfeilstorchs
Migration was difficult to know. It’s not surprising. Who could say why birds leave for a time, where they go? Aristotle thought that birds just transmuted into a different species when the weather changed. Later, it was assumed that birds hibernated. Charles Morton believed they flew to the moon. Even in the 19th century naturalists…
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This Lethal Practice
And here, a poet in a forgotten state. Caucasian Albania, we call it, though it was in what is now Azerbaijan. We don’t even know what they called it. And yet, there the poet. He’s brute forcing a piece as we watch. The trappings are familiar. A cat on a windowsill by candlelight. A half-eaten…