Carol Frost
Sea Eve
Where the sea’s gray unrest
froths the shoreline
the oyster eater steps from palmettos
naked. She is hungry
and has seen the shell and flesh
in turtle stomachs.
With some distaste
she eats. How not to taste
tidal uproar and tidal downfall
in swallowing
the sea’s fruit?
When she comes again with others,
be it assumed some will not eat
from the sea,
that for them the unrest
is an omen:
When Nature’s frame
unhinges itself, the shoals
and grasses torn,
it will be on her
for bothering the sea’s eternity.
Sea Eve
Where the sea’s gray unrest
froths the shoreline
the oyster eater steps from palmettos
naked. She is hungry
and has seen the shell and flesh
in turtle stomachs.
With some distaste
she eats. How not to taste
tidal uproar and tidal downfall
in swallowing
the sea’s fruit?
When she comes again with others,
be it assumed some will not eat
from the sea,
that for them the unrest
is an omen:
When Nature’s frame
unhinges itself, the shoals
and grasses torn,
it will be on her
for bothering the sea’s eternity.
Cove
The mudflat at low tide looks like a world pictured from far above-- continent, water, cloud, then as we come closer sarabandes of green where receding currents strew seaweed in runnels. When the waters return, spring catfish come under osprey cry from cedars-- building nests from winter flint and wax, moss, plastic bags, dried bones and hibiscus twig. Pinned by talons, |
liver picked, a catfish on a bare limb suffers in the bright center of cruelty, thinks one passerby, or suffers nothing…. Say the minute a bird stumbles up through air to a bare limb, the cove glistens like fat, or light is porous with fire. Nothing once or ever kind or true, or unkind tells how beyond plainest truth to say this. |
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Carol Frost's new book of poems Trilogy is scheduled for publication from Tupelo Press in 2014. Her poems have appeared in four Pushcart anthologies, and she directs Winter with the Writers at Rollins College, where she is the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Professor of English.