Robert Krut
RADIOING THE FLOOD
The sun throws a violin
to a cloud, its languid song
across the blanketed wheat field--
there’s a storm coming and
it’s coming from you, each
line in your hand, destruction’s path--
you can try to shave it down
but the thunder has started,
each raindrop, camouflauged blood
wishing to be holy water—rise
up, stand up in the flood when
the wave is now a sea--
this is how it will be--
us underwater from this moment
to eternity, the base of the ocean,
looking down to a broken string caught
in the tooth of a drowned radio antenna,
cusped by an open hand of prismed light,
and you know you are to blame.
RADIOING THE FLOOD
The sun throws a violin
to a cloud, its languid song
across the blanketed wheat field--
there’s a storm coming and
it’s coming from you, each
line in your hand, destruction’s path--
you can try to shave it down
but the thunder has started,
each raindrop, camouflauged blood
wishing to be holy water—rise
up, stand up in the flood when
the wave is now a sea--
this is how it will be--
us underwater from this moment
to eternity, the base of the ocean,
looking down to a broken string caught
in the tooth of a drowned radio antenna,
cusped by an open hand of prismed light,
and you know you are to blame.
Robert Krut is the author of This is the Ocean (Bona Fide Books, 2013), winner of the Melissa Gregory Lanitis Poetry Prize, as well as The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009). He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
