Jane O’Hara, Wish You Were Here
We are Here: as the Light Finds Us
By Chloé Firetto-Toomey LLC M.F.A
Here is the mid-air severance from all that grounds us.
The catapulted sow, heaved to apogee, holds the fulcrum.
Torso tilts in upturned descent towards piglets pitched
and collapsing. Snouts and trotters vaulted in blue stratus
where the clouds break; the terrible distance between
udders and muzzles, legs flung in grand jeté,
is not a “poetic ballet of loss” as I thought
when I started writing this painting as a poem.
Here is the art of violent departures, the gospels
of yowling mothers; of offspring keen-squealing—
no orchestral score for a vanished landscape, but shrills
akin to my three-year-old son sob-gasping for comfort.
Here are questions as bodies, plummeting—
piglets as panic flairs announcing the loss
of what nurtures us, and the dangers of not paying attention.
Below, the pelicans arrow their squadron west,
compassed by the sky’s polarised light.
Long strokes of wingbeats through the wind’s cleavage.
What do I know of their hunger and endurance, or
the waning shoals of anchovies; of the growling croaks
in breeding season and the way chicks recognise
their parents’ voices; low grunts from throat pouches
in the mangrove thickets of barrier islands —
the destination beyond this frame where
they steer their storm-bound formation.
A couple in a red convertible take a selfie,
at the bottom of the tableau. Two heads and arms
disembodied and encapsulated. Not as astronauts
rinsed in earthshine approaching the spacecraft’s hull,
as I once thought, but lit in the camera app’s flash.