The keepers walk among Galapagos turtles, pummel their domed backs with short sticks in twilight at this furthest edge of America and herd them to their cement-block shelter. Looking like World War II helmets, abandoned after a battle on the grass, they wear white numbers on their backs neat as license plates - 5, 16, 21 - these who once could not be numbered. A keeper's rapping brings out an old man's neck, the skin hanging in loose folds, brings out a beaked head naked as a baby bird's, magnified terribly by those enormous eyes. And in that skull hard as a hazel shell, years are not numbered by the names of cities or made things like religions or wars. Memory is the abrasion of rock and sea, the rub of the two hands of earth's time. The last one locked in its shelter, we flock to our licensed shells - our headlight tunneling the distance of our vision in the San Diego dusk. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE EXISTING POOL by HAYDEN CARRUTH WHAT THING A BIRD WOULD LOVE by ROBERT FROST THE DAY OF THE DEAD SOLDIERS; MARY 30, 1869 by EMMA LAZARUS READING WHITMAN IN A TOILET STALL by TIMOTHY LIU STUDY FOR A GEOGRAPHICAL TRAIL; 5. MARYLAND by CLARENCE MAJOR SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY: TOM MERRITT by EDGAR LEE MASTERS NOTHING WILL CURE THE SICK LION BUT TO EAT AN APE' by MARIANNE MOORE |