Jessica Hincapié
Mammoth
All the good ones have done it. Taken to some seato avoid the look you get from the people who love you
when they aren’t making loving you look easy.
I go in shallow, knee deep hardly. The sargassum a red stench.
For a million years it was just microbes in their torpor.
Waiting patiently for some pin point moment. All that work
leading to this mammoth mourning. This continual tossing
of angels. Anyone who’s ever stood at the edge of any ocean
already knows. To be alive you had to be some kind
of consequence. The sequelae of time’s piling birthmarks
and concrete. Empires of consumed ortolans.
The justifying that comes with teeth. Mostly I walk away
from epiphany finding it hard to separate enlightenment
from finality. I’d come all this way to learn to be alone
in case one day I ended up alone. It wasn’t an impossibility.
Not with the way people walked in and out of each other’s lives.
Even the Orca on her tour of grief. Some things
you don’t see coming. Other things you swear you do see
and so they send you. Like the first film made of a train.
How the first audience to see the film was so sure
the train was headed straight for them. Half the theatre
running for its life. Mistaking light for fixity.
Sometimes all your hard work feels like a dirty trick.