Elizabeth Jacobson: There are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral

I walk a long way

sinking in soft sand.


My feet, two creatures

of burden.


Low lying clouds

mirror stormy ocean waves


and wild eddies.

The wrack line


littered with elkhorn

with coral sponges—


each one a finger

from a different hand.


Disappeared

are the reefs


they arose from.

As a child


I combed black rocks of a jetty

prying starfish from pools


sucked salt

off their legs,


curious podia searching

my tongue. 


I craved also

the taste of ash


ate cigarette butts

from the beach—


put anything in my mouth

to know it.

 
.



I was nine

when I first saw the photographs—


bodies overflowing

from wheelbarrows.


Corpses pitched

in heaps like firewood


at the sides of barracks.

Didn't recognize what they were.


Then I noticed the bird,

a raven,


eating

the inside of a human nose.



.



There are as many songs in the world

as branches of coral.


The sponges

the sea pens,


the whips,

have a bloody


earthy smell.

I lay the few I’ve collected


on a wicker table to dry

under the adonidia palms


and squeeze out the remaining brine.

Soon they begin to sigh.


.



These hours

when the sky is white


my heart reels

like a cay in a squall


and I arrive again

at the scowl


of the red brick gate.

There were no clouds


that day, above the camp.

The grassy fields


bright green.

Tall birches


in full leaf.

I walked weightlessly


on the train tracks,

one foot


in front of the other

balancing on rails.


I pulled a rusty hair pin

from the soil


put it in my mouth—

75-year-old tarnish


a perfumed

female essence.


The remaining brick

chimneys crumbling,


splintered garrisons—

burial pits moaned—


here was an endless landscape

of hatred this primeval—


it was as if I saw

each soul


who had arrived and

departed,


shimmering,

impossibly,


in the emerald fields.

And everything


broke open

and sang.


.


There were no clouds

that day


I visited Birkenau,

but the sky,


it was white.

The meadows,


they glistened,

the tall birches,


beckoned.

Before I left


I ate a few blades of grass—

peeled off a strip of bark


pressed two sharp stones

into my well-made shoe.

Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Poets Laureate Fellow.  Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. 

Copyright 2021 Elizabeth Jacobson. First published in the Ginko Prize, 2021.