George Kovalenko

WHODUNIT

I’m afraid there’s been an accident. 
Something specific stopped the flow of blood.
The scalloped filet of the beaches saw it done.
Who, when I was young, was astonished
that I hadn’t been created as a shark?
Then, the astonishment could go no further.
I had no sense that down the corridor
of that specific thought—arms guiding me
with candelabras—might be the sandy texture
of the eyespot apparatus, might be the much more fanciful
idea that in the parliament of sharks
are mannered sharks of such distinguished character
that they discuss their shock at not having been born
as me. All speculation, so to speak,
but then so was the Adoration of the Magi,
as Giotto figured it, as if a sleepless doubt had organized
the color palate of devotion,
had run around the house all night, taking a book brush
to the encyclopedia, turning the crosses upside down
then right side up again so that, by morning, all you notice
is how tired you are. The figures’ awe
betrays this inanition. The golden light is midnight bright.
To hold God’s tiny body in your hands demands
a laxer bedtime than we’ve grown accustomed to.
There are, today, too many ways to picture
what one has imagined. The gist is, having done so,
description takes its place with airs of such authority
that it insists on clams casino every Sunday
and spends its evenings squatting on your nightstand,
breathing. This, friends, is a problem. So, when I say
there’s been an accident, I mean there’s been an accident
the way just about anything is accidental until it’s thought.
To think, much less to picture it, was awful. The flesh
retained only its abstract ochre of meat. There might be
other, more precise words for that color
that are inaccessible to me for now (burnt dusk, maybe,
or, elsewhere, citrus pink). What a propeller does
to what it comes in contact with is sacrifice itself
to the idea of forward motion.
In turn, the notion of that forward motion kicks the bucket
from the perspective of the moved.
For the moved, the world falls behind. We have this trick
to thank for the snake-oil miracle
of sunrise. This, too, might be a kind of sacrifice
of reason to the law.
Once you concede the world is made up
of a great many particulars
and that these particulars are inextricably entangled
with a great many great big ideas
you can mess with the perspective 
’til the cows come home without changing
a thing. Here, they (the cows, I mean) are great big hunks
of shoulder and of flank and smell of highland evening.
The muskox in the Museum of Natural History is,
I imagine, largely odorless. The air, too, smells
only of the air itself. History, by contrast,
smells of pencil shavings and eraser worms. Naturally,
there is no sunrise here, only the world turning over.
The beach and the accident had, in the big picture
of accidents, nothing to do with one another. In another sense,
having to do, is not exactly what the matter is at all.
The human and the painted eye are almost indistinguishable
and almost unrelated. I know this from experience,
which, like a bronze wool splinter in the palm, puts matters
of the heart in one’s own hands.
You can, I think, feel it. In the mouth
of the superior vena cava, whole empires
swirl in and out of the abstract. The beach dragged on.
The dead were livid. The kelp stank. The dead
stank. Summer, like a wind-up pearl diver, sloshed around
the bottom of the air conditioners lolling
out of the mouths of windows of the government housing
on the shore. The water wanted nothing more.
The lovers had each other in the colonnade. At dinner,
both their backs were fluted. Where one had touched
the other and the other way around, the state had carried
out mass executions (one learned years later,
the other never knew). The city, then, ran flush against the sea,
which frothed with bits of what the people called the people.
Someone’s summer billionaire bought up the shoreline recently,
which has been lifeless since they put the levy in
(few fish, no boats) and in its sunrise-oiled tabletop, the steeple
and the colonnade look unambiguously
out of date. Only one ever thinks about the other—
so they both think—and when she does,
she sometimes stops her heart. She watches herself do it.
She knows her body, then, was citrus pink,
The sun a burn hole in the dusk’s upholstery.

GEORGE KOVALENKO is a poet, critic, and translator. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and Lana Turner. He holds an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of Denver.