The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem from THE BOOK OF REVELATION

The first child arrived
as through the oiled doorway of the sea

then came the purple dark closing time
the world a sea of insects
rolling on a waterbed into oblivion

Now that I am a mother
I almost never dream

but when I do
I’m sorry

I dream of apocalypse

The first word of Book of Revelation
is apokalypsis
meaning unveiling

man digging into the velvet sack
of the ocean floor—

revealing its labyrinth of bleached coral
divesting the wrecks—

or how at the nursery my son chooses
two kinds of hyacinth to plant

and appraises them daily
until the blooms finally appear

then narrows his eyes
and pushes the flower
into his mouth

his sister laughing
running down the sidewalk
away from us

A child can get sick
on sweet things

and with that tongue
start talking

like a king

BRIEF EDEN

For part of one strange year we lived
in a small house at the edge of a wood.
No neighbors, which suited us. Nobody
to ask questions. Except
for the one big question we went on
asking ourselves.
                                 That spring
myriads of birds stopped over
briefly. Birds we’d never seen before, drawn
to our leafy quiet and our brook and because,
as we later learned, the place lay beneath
a flyway. Flocks appeared overnight—birds
brilliant or dull, with sharp beaks
or crossed bills, birds small
and enormous, all of them pausing
to gorge at the feeder, to rest their wings,
and disappear. Each flock seemed surer than we
of a destination. By the time we’d watched them
wing north in spring, then make
an anxious autumn return,
we too had pulled it together and we too moved
into what seemed to be our lives.