Two Poems by Ange Mlinko

The Open C

You stare into it for days, all your life
as if waiting for a curtain to rise. As if
a production of Ariel and Prospero
were pending in the ocean’s void,
the amphitheatre of the asteroid.
There’s only shocked quartz below.
Where sky and sea are never parted—
there the mass extinction started.

Now resurface, to the serene
compact of our opening scene:
one blue mirror reflects a poreless face,
dazzling evening’s investigators.
The other, darker, on the case
shows, in close-up, the craters.

Flamboyance

The lighthouse fruits like a bromeliad.
Its pineapple lens came from Paris.
It is named for an evangelist.

It stands like a majuscule, clad
above the glassy wilderness
in an ecstasy of coastal mist.

When you go there, don’t expect
to see the flamingo right away.
Sky and bayou, serene as mirrors

hung too high to be checked
for your reflection, discourage display.
He wades at the center of rumor’s

rippling circles, which he flicks,
standing on his honor, with one foot.
He has lost his flamboyance—

which is what we call flamingo flocks.
Knocked off his migration route
by that habitual annoyance,

a hurricane (or an archangel),
he’s reconciled to doubt,
displaced by several lines of latitude.

He should be as easy to spot as a changeling
when the tide trickles out.
All the heartbreak you’ve withstood

has prepared you for this disappointment.
A prescribed burn smoulders.
You can’t tell if it’s smoking or misting—

the visual field smeared as with ointment.
You will reach for your binoculars
to catch fire and water coexisting.

Ange Mlinko is a professor, critic, and author of six books of poetry. Her latest collection, Venice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), came out last spring. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, for now.