Arion

Listen. You were to choose death
by your own hand or by jumping
into the abyss. Child of woman

and man, thumbing your kithara
for pirates at the stern, you caroled
your hymn, O Far-darting Apollo! invoking

the god of poetry, but Momus
listened closely. About the vessel
I porpoised in abandonment drawn

by wildness compelling me to free
you, poet in full robes, from death. So
you rode my back to Taenarum where you

abandoned me to arid air as thanks.
From the sky now, I watch the enslaving
of all wonder, the poaching of light;

how you drive us into nothing.
Like rays of sun, spearing the blue, sparkle
tumbling from a hull’s shadow,

your poems still sting of devotion.

Globicephala macrorhynchus

You take to eating sticks saying
to kindle fire inside your torso,

lava through your veins. You
crave eruption. In the evening

you sit on the bluff;
name the stars you can see—

naked and asteroidal until
morning reaches out and plucks Lyra,

to save you from lack of touch,
you are Arion scattering

poems in the wind. You lost
your map, eardrums burst

from falling down the stairs
after the last man. His rum-bottle-green

whales breach the surface
of your skin still, scarred

onto your meridians. You watch a pod
of blackfish leap one by one,

each one following the other’s distress,
onto the sand in the sun-fire,

charcoal bodies drying on the beach—
each one hungry for the other.  

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of three collections of poetry including Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was awarded the Eric Hoffer Medal Provacateur, longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Books Award. He also authored the memoir Antiman (Restless Books 2021) which was a finalist for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, 2021 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography. As a translator, his version of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (Kaya 2019) won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2020. He teaches in the MFA program at Emerson College and lives in the Boston area.

Published July 15 2022