HOME / poem: A weekly poem, read by the author.

Autobiographical

By Ed SkoogPosted Wednesday, May 19, 1999, at 3:30 AM ET

I rode my bike across the Argentine.
Marble arms raised for joy in the garden,
a slush of sculpture salvaged from wrecked ships
around Don d'Carlo's sandstone pen
carved from a boulder fallen from that cliff.

When I was a nude Sicilian youth, and had been
lounging on the piazza for a good hour,
above the sea, I heard a cry from the beach
and ran. A seal pup lay curled around
a stone. Someone--my brothers?--had beat it

senseless, so I heaved the sack of fur
back to surf, the body cooling my body,
and swam some yards until it sank to green.
Back up the steps, I dried on the wall
fell to sleep forgot the beast and grew

athletic and kept my tongue back of my head
obeyed the trainer loved a girl she climbed
a tree beside the training yard to whisper
my secret names from the arbor. War grew
as we slept. I fled across the sea

to escape conjecture; I biked all over
to build a body of forgiveness, the wheels
wearing down a new world of old roads.
I rode across the Argentine, my spokes
speaking for me, to the house of a friend:

I swam in the sea there, among the mangled steel.
A lost flotilla, the hemisphere
tapped in my ear, the ticking of whales
the warnings of sand. And when I drowned
I sank slowly and meant every fathom.

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Ed Skoog lives in New Orleans. His poems have appeared recently in Third Coast, Gulf Coast, the Marlboro Review, Cut Bank, Teacup, and LitRag.

To visit Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site, click here.

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

More Poems columns