The Doldrum Fracture Zone

The place where sailors—though now open
to all professions—went to consider the mirage
of their own despair. Once, only sailors could
go there: the breezeless place,
the weed-choked and stinking sea plain
where they stalled for weeks, months. Today,
the Zone comes to us,
its great gray inertness dragged
like opaque knife wounds over each
who stands on a shore and calls it in,
dragged over him or her who believes his or her despair is
a mirage and not
a mirror. . . . That man
who still holds the handle of the mailbox open, its huge black mouth
having just swallowed
a letter that cannot be unwritten
which falls on a top of a pile of other such letters
in their white dresses
in the dark—that man has called it in.
There is a sound of tiny roots being torn,
and a water spider, skating smoothly over the Zone’s flat surface, sinks.

***

Thomas Lux was born in Northampton and has written prolifically for the last thirty years.His poems often dwell in the fantasies of everyday life, finding histories behind everything around him. “The Doldrum Fracture Zone” was published in The Street of Clocks (2001).