JOEL LONG—"PRESERVATION" (Issue 20)

Sugar House Review · Joel Long's "Preservation"

PRESERVATION 

After they buried the man, the villagers returned
for the crocodiles. They did not care which one
killed the man. Some were longer than the dead man;

some were small as children. They were housed in cement boxes,
slick green, squared water beneath, not mangrove swamps
or deltas, estuaries or river mouths. The villagers did not

care they were safe for now, did not care it was only one.
They brought ropes and tied serrated snouts of crocodiles
that, with a leap, could catch, swallow whole bats, leaping fish,

birds out of air. They dragged 300 bewildered beasts
from ponds into the open where the villagers wailed
the death of one of their own, lifted knives for every animal,

hammers, clubs, beat down the long heads, inscrutable eyes
hooded by scales that not one villager could see far enough
inside to make him hold back once since all knew the spark

they needed extinguished inside the heart of the one animal
before them, inside that brain that they intended to crush
until there was nothing more worth crushing, some groan

we cannot translate seeping from the roped mouths. The man,
they say, was picking grass when the crocodile attacked. Now hundreds
of crocodiles, each perfect in its skeleton, in the way the stomach

worked and tongue, that heart stilled in artisan chambers whose
electric pulse sent blood from nostril to tail, each animal its own
size, colored like agates and jade, every scale a worry stone, round,

one for every hand, now hundreds of crocodiles are dead, and we cannot
make one of them, make even one come back, a pile of limp weeds
shaped like crocodiles swimming in crocodiles stilled: one dead man

cannot say a thing about what he thinks about the body
and what was undone and the darkness he left behind, smoke,
rising from perfect bodies of crocodiles into the flame of sky.

ABOUT THE POET 

Joel Long’s book Winged Insects won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Lessons in Disappearance (2012) and Knowing Time by Light (2010) were published by Blaine Creek Press. His chapbooks, Chopin’s Preludes and Saffron Beneath Every Frost were published by Elik Press. His poems and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Sports Literate, Prairie Schooner, Bellingham Review, Rhino, Bitter Oleander, Massachusetts Review, Terrain.org, and Water-Stone Review, among others. He lives in Salt Lake City.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW 

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.

The Sound of Sugar....Joel Long

Let The Living Return To The Sea

Last night we watched a baby octopus

on video with a child. It had washed

ashore the border of tide, white water

the water’s distance from air. Living thing

moved a line of coral foam, undulating

tentacled legs, water retreating to its mouth,

gliding its spectral torso over glazed sand.

We come to this town to bury the dead,

but dinner, we hear two births will come,

and the dead take turns at quiet instead.

There are photos, printouts from ultrasounds—

mothers and mothers to be for the first

pass images around the table. One niece

has a baby inside that could be an octopus,

bulge of light rounding like a head—it is a head—

a shadow that will be eyes, but the hands

wave flippers in ink and legs like a tail

in the gray sea, the precise hope for fingers,

toes, and bones. The miracle brain inside

space the size of a pearl begins to steam,

begins the vision.

The other niece is showing,

stomach swelling beneath her blue dress,

the child inside her with limbs, hands already

brought to its mouth, a face becoming its face,

one of us. In the photo, we see ribs, translucent

skin over ribs, hips hiding—we will know

in weeks, she, he, sex blooming the waters.

Another child has been watching the octopus,

has put on the mask of a monster, climbs the back

of Auntie’s chair, his red hair no brighter than fire

he puts into space. He knows the small thing

in the darkness comes for him, sister, brother,

love, this self coming, sacred book illustrated

by the monk who studies shells and moth wings,

saints and all their signs, angel, bird, ox, and lion,

and we know the cells find their way to hair,

fingernails, eyes that change the muted world

into forests inside the brain, octopus pulled

back into the entire sea by wave, pulsing heart

of all water, drawing it inside, pushing against it,

propelling its body through distance that lasts,

the bright coral, clown fish, eels, above water,

sky wrapped around the globe and the mind

that writes it all down in grief, in joy, Being

itself, brief and infinite, raspberry, sparrow.

About the Poet:

Joel Long’s book Lessons in Disappearance was published in 2012. Knowing Time by Light was published by Blaine Creek Press in 2010. His book Winged Insects won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and was published in 1999. His chapbooks, Chopin’s Preludes and Saffron Beneath Every Frost were published from Elik Press. His poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Ocean State Review, Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Rhino, Bitter Oleander, Crab Orchard Review, Bellingham Review, Sou’wester, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, Po­ems and Plays, and Seattle Review, and anthologized in American Poetry: the Next Generation, Essential Love, Fresh Water, and I Go to the Ruined Place. He received the Mayor’s Artist Award for Literary Arts at the Utah Arts Festival and the Writers Advocate Award from Writers at Work.

About the Sound of Sugar:
We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.