Christopher Crawford

De Profundis | Sea Song for Couples in Love
March 21, 2016 Crawford Christopher

De Profundis

 

Sometimes you are going past on a motorbike and you look up in time to see a woman who loved you hand in hand with a man

you don’t know, she stretches up on tip-toe, eyes wide and shining with the wine they have drunk or the love they will later make,

to kiss him as they disappear through the door of a bar.

Sometimes this doesn’t happen

but something else does. Say you are going past on a motorbike and you look up and there’s one star piercing through and it says

it’s alright Chris I am what you guys call lonely too but more profoundly so. I’ve waited a long time for the light of my face to reach

you Chris for you are my reflection on earth I shit you not.

And sometimes you aren’t going past anything

at all and you aren’t on your motorbike but you are on your balcony looking down and over and across the city at night there are

no stars but one red pinprick of light from the tip of the tv tower way out past the suburbs and you look at it, this single point of

red light on the lip of the city’s vanishing point, crying out its terrible waves of silence and power

 

 

Sea Song for Couples in Love

 

Oh crab, you are an

ugly bastard. And

octopus, stop

snickering behind that

rock, your horrifying

arms disfigured by

nipple-like sucking

suckers, disgusting.

 

But two crabs making love;

or two octopuses: the male inside

her, watching the pulsing

beak of her mouth, how deep, how

mad her eyes are.

 

Christopher Crawford’s poems, essays and translations have appeared in magazines like The Rumpus, Puerto del Sol, Clinic, Rattle, The Collagist, The Cortland Review, Agenda and elsewhere. He lives in Prague where he edits the literary journal, B O D Y (bodyliterature.com)