Drake's Passage Poem by Christopher Keller

There is a clear language
spilled into ears,
recovered by eyes with a bit of bruising,
from the huge viscera of oceans hiding
its strongest mannerisms,
within,
convexing and concaving around
till surfacing
in a natural wreck of motion,
where the warm Pacific meets the cold Atlantic,
where a jettisoned body
palpates the ocean pulse
that ruptures the thin and pliable fields
of skin. I taught where swells of
student fists, feet and voices
felt to break against
a tiny landscape of a schoolroom's
white tiled floor and burgundy wall.
My knee punching
into the scintillating nerves of their back,
my forearm on the bone of their neck.
All of this falling over
a row of desks,
a bench, into an easel.
I was told poultice was on the palms of my hands
that dragged into their skin,
that locked their body
into a padded room
of windowless walls. We think, cessation,
because there is jealousy
for the body
of involuntary power, for thought
without enamel,
the clear language.
Even in the languorous pool of a locked room,
where the most immature minds
distance themselves
from a dousing of unfeeling, knowing
this is not their place,
and lead themselves to the wet,
bluing, whitening,
distinctly,
into their body of water,
where they sink the bladed tools of mind in the perforating
routes of waves.