JOHN C. MANNONE

Hoarders

This morning while getting ready

for a poetry workshop, the hotel TV

next to a stack of poems written

the previous day, shows a hoarder.

It seems to me she was collecting

dreams that she couldn’t let go. I think

about a pile of boxes in my own

living room, and the columns

of notebooks in the garage. I struggle

to throw them out. In some, equations

from graduate school, lines yellowing

yet still with an elegance physicists

appreciate: the language of numbers;

images, even abstract, beautiful;

the music of symbols that dance

as poems in my head. In other notebooks

checkered or zebra’d, decorated

paisley black & white, or impressed

with purple and blue hexagons,

there are written poems, words buried

in the dusty pages with mould

& mildew growing between them.

They are waiting for their resurrection.

Going Quietly

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

—Dylan Thomas (1952)

Groton to Portsmouth, I flew—engine droning, skylark 

wings over Mystic Seaport. Sailboat sails ruffled quietly

against the sun-sparkled bay. I remember the bright lights

on a gift shop globe with the same sparkle in blown glass—

an underwater world etched with canyons.

I peered deep inside the blue, past the corals, past glimmers

occluding glass. Visualized streams of pale pearl bubbles flung

from propellers, an infinity of them thrashing for the surface— 

a flash of USS Thresher going down. I imagined

the Officer of the Watch commanding ten degree down bubble,

but the sub crashed through the test depth of thirteen hundred feet.

Pipes burst. Saltwater sprayed shorting circuits. Reactor scramed.

No power left. Blowing ballast, much too slow. Now they’re dead

in the water. The helmsman’s arms—tattooed anchors—gripping

up the smart sails. No luck. Sternplanes down, but too streamlined.

Metal flexed, creaked, clanged, and moaned. Silverless fittings

screamed rage against the crush. The dying of the light.

Sonar hissed one hundred twenty nine times, it didn’t skylark

the darkness. Eight thousand four hundred feet down the glassy sea

curving off the Cape Cod graveyard—two hundred twenty miles

from its shipyard-birth. Not quite full circle.

______________________________________________________________________

The SSN-593 Thresher imploded at 9:18 a.m. on April 10, 1963 during deep dive testing. All 129 men perished. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/k19/disasters_detail2.html

John C. Mannone has work in The Rye Whiskey Review, Poetry South, Baltimore Review and others. He won the Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature and is one of the eleven global winners in the 2020 Antarctica Poetry Exhibition. He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and others. http://jcmannone.wordpress.com