Skullduggery
Skulls, I’ve heard, have stories to tell. I wish I could interview mine: learn why it lacks the smooth globular shape shown in biology labs, doctors’ examining rooms. Why a dysmorphic groove runs the brief length from my crown down the saggital suture-- a trough providentially hidden by hair. Why it produces a pleasant sensation when pressed, a satisfaction akin to my fingertip’s search for the point of a leaf or sharp corner of paper. Phrenologists claimed that the skull’s outer surface conformed to the purpose and shape of the brain-part beneath. That the crown of the head, the closest to God, was related to reverence-- an odd echo of Eastern conception of the crown chakra as nexus to the Divine. So what of this gutter of mine? This bevel between embankments, crown to the back of the head? As if my cortex reacted at birth like an anemone shrinking away from belief. As if where the parietal plates should have closed to a smoothness, a moat developed to safeguard my brain from the impulse to worship. Ditched it. Moral Compass If there’s a moral North Star that flickers above any storm, my compass needle was skewed: pointed not to the magnetic pole but to what I believed my true north. Landlocked but longing to sail I embarked with no chart but the love I considered my right, fell afoul of wind gusts sweeping us south to a zone of white squalls. Devastation at sea and on shore: connections as fragile as corals, muddy secrets like mangroves unroofed, the future washed out and reshaped like a tropical coastline. Storms pass. Marine life returns. Mangroves sprout new stems and leaves out of still-living trunks. Time wobbles the earth on its axis, the moral north shifts.
2 Comments
colleen clopton
6/25/2020 11:04:04 am
totally enjoined both Moral North and Skulduggery (this one a hilarious last stanza -- a laffing surprise. Congratulations on your choices.
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Leslie L Van Hall
6/25/2020 11:11:47 am
These are both fabulous. Love your poetry.
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