1.
You will read this, I hope, years or decades from now
when you have made it to the other side of whatever
dull waters you are crossing now. I do not know
if you can see the far bank yet, or if that shore
even can be recognized through the present miasms,
not so much solid land as another
heavy shape on the water, and my voice, this poem,
perhaps only another murmur—Listen,
I want to say (one more phantom among phantoms)
I know I don’t know anything, I’ve only seen
a loss of amplitude in your music, a flatness
in your affect, something more than adolescence
yours, mine, can explain, or precocious weltschmerz—
there was a joy I never saw, until it was missed.
2.
When I say “dull waters,” what comes to mind
is the Little Calumet River, as seen from
the Indiana Toll Road, two hours each morning
some twenty years ago. Try to imagine
yourself riding shotgun, backwash of long-haul tandems
buffeting the subcompact, an impossible
slurry of snowmelt, road salt, ash from the Gary mills
crusting the windshield, I am hunched over the wheel
trying to see through, and there, for a moment,
a stretch of poisoned backwater, stands of reedgrass,
a sudden flash of color—a great blue heron,
in a single shaft of sunlight, perfect stillness….
like a movie, you want to say, or an omen,
and I reply, we have arrived, and moved on.
Photo by Presian Nedyalkov on Unsplash
Ben Corvo
In the early 20th century the family of Ben Corvo’s father immigrated to Chicago, later dispersing across Chicagoland and Michiana, and eventually throughout the world. In his own young adult life, Ben Corvo himself returned to work and study in Chicago—and (not always consciously, or willingly) to excavate an often difficult, painful family history. “Heron” itself draws specifically on his long-ago daily commute between Chicago’s South Side and northwest Indiana, but it also recapitulates two general themes in his personal and family history there—on the one hand, the heaviness and vividness of place, and on the other, a pervasive sense of restlessness and contingency.
Ben Corvo often visits family and friends in the Chicago region, but his work, studies, and other, more obscure pulls have carried him throughout North and South America, and later across oceans. He presently lives in Jerusalem, where his work and studies explore connections and tensions among ethics, politics, and poetics. In addition to his scholarly and educational work, his poetry has appeared previously in Salmagundi, Magma, The Tel Aviv Review of Books, and other publications. Website