The fifty-ninth issue of Columbia Journal featured a poem by English poet Toby Martinez de las Rivas, and, as it so happens, I was given a copy of Rivas’s book Terror as a present at Christmas. In the interest of superstition, I felt I couldn’t not feature his poem; and, jokes aside, I like “The Floodmeadow.”
The poem speaks of a “debrided” angel, which, I believe, is a quite beautiful image for a moment at which plenty of people seem to feel that their usual holiday merriment has been dampened. And I value the image in general, because I think that Christmas, and angels in particular—which, I suspect, are no less frightening than any other extraterrestrial creatures—are too often sentimentalized. A poem that literally ends with “nothing,” that is infused with an apocalyptic tenor that also sounds a bit weary—I suspect that this is a fitting gesture for the end of an odd year and the beginning of a shining new future (in which one might dare to hope).
The Floodmeadow
Toby Martinez de las Rivas
The silhouettes of men are putting up a scaffold
around the slowly rising shell of a house
in the last field but one before the floodmeadow;
deep melodic clanging of iron bars;
boards deafening a rubber mallet; a voice
that is untranslatable in the distance.
Tenors of warning & approval, urgencies,
the voice of the sun ringing
from the surfaces of metals out through the air
dim w/ pollen, the seed-bearing achenes
of dandelion like parachutes, the far places shake
in them, the verticals are blurred.
The telegraph poles give off a hum of tar
& creosote, silver pylons like titans
marching over the hills holding bundles of wire
studded w/ migratory swallows beneath
their arms they will deliver beyond the horizon.
& on Woodbury where we flew, pa,
the balsawood chuckglider in the silence
of the morning as the wind rippled through the grass
like an archangel they have debrided
the tranches of earth & the disarticulated bodies
of men are staring up into the terrific deep
blur of sky punctuated w/ clouds in the shapes
of chariots, rings, a mirror, nothing.
