Third Place Winner, December 2008 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Third Place Winner, December 2008

Memento Mori *Brenda Levy Tate* (Pen Shells) Hold it to your ear and listen, my father said. You'll hear the sea. He offered the conch — one of a pair on the Florida souvenir counter — and I lifted it against my never-cut curls. The ocean spoke then (it must have been so, for who would doubt the word of a navy man?). Shoal-dance: hiss and boom and mutter. We claimed both pink-throated ornaments, set them beside our fireplace, where smoke bit into their soft bosses. My father dusted them often at first, then less and less. He died on a May morning. I wasn't there. Today I am in the family room, clearing my half- life rubble, those trinkets never fully paid for. My lost sailor rises from his water rest, a bubble seeking light. Hold it to your ear, he murmurs. I study the remaining shell, pitted with ash acid, patterned with worm burrows among its turrets. It looks starved. I raise it to a lobe; my gold stud presses where neck and jaw collide. Skull tectonics. What sea still moves over these old reefs and reaches? Just the eddy of my own blood — personal undertow that sluices bone — salt and iron doomed as any rotten vessel. Heaven forgive my unbelief. I strain to resurrect a single current here, flood and pull now silent beneath a nacre sunset. Invented waves dry in ruined chambers. My father retreats, a tide ebbing through his deaf labyrinth. I cannot call after him, nor even wring a prayer to wash my aragonite dead. Comments by judges Hélène Cardona and John Fitzgerald: “This poem flows with a wonderful rhythm. Great use of language for a story that is both personal and universal.”