A couple of weeks ago, BSDFF Promo Team writer Laurel Nakanishi discovered that UM's Visiting Hugo Writer, Elizabeth Robinson, is a secret surf film fan. Because Laurel, too, loves surfing films, they went to see Riding Giants. Here are two collaborative poem-reactions:
* * * * *
Head Over Spinning
Kicking the up, the notion of up,
I know the way by the bubbles at my mouth
open or closed, in relation to water, or oxygen,
all movement - glutted, all kinetic - crackling.
All waves pitching up their face, shining
with a glaze of surf. Black water is hateful,
he says, pulling in his limbs. Within a minute
they were numb. These hands touch the temples,
the cold's ice-cream headache. And the leash tethered,
rock bound, black anchor. Gravity awash with gravity,
the new terms of breath - fresh bundle of air.
As if anything could be so bright. Gull crying
out of its own lung. On the upside, down shore,
shorn. We let them ramble all the way to the sea,
polished in the scramble of sand, water and the gasp
their small heads surfacing from the foam.
The gasp, the gravity, the rhythm sets them down,
lifts up bodies as if to say: Here they are.
* * * * *
600 Miles In
Surf
salt land,
purified by it
and paddling to it.
The smell of saltwater rebounds.
Rough it, the chop, thick faced
and huge, gnarly beside their sun-tanned skins.
Call it tide pools, these slow pocketed waters.
This oblivious green muscle revolving around itself, as if
she cups the water and flings it, flush turn hip.
This is the way the body clings to motion. Tides return
razored or slickered or sand washed or dead or caverns caved in
reefs sponging up foam, while bodies buoy or sink. Sun inside water. Water
the board as it tombstones. Dragged up by the dead weight, se anchor low.
The actual length of board as compared to the height of a wave, extending.
Poems by BSDFF Promo Team writer Laurel Nakanishi and Elizabeth Robinson
