Frozen Charlotte: Poems
by Susan de Sola
(Able Muse, 2019, 126 pp., $19.95)
The magnificent seascape/ice-scape on the cover of Frozen Charlotte, Susan de Sola’s new poetry collection, is all blue. But, like the book’s contents, it coruscates with light. Dip into the book, browse through it, or read it nonstop: you emerge with an after-image that’s all color. If I had to capture these poems in one word? Color.
In the field the coyote yip-yips imminent danger;
……….the dog in the kitchen rumbles a basso growl;
the field sends back a shrill elastic baying;
……….the kitchen gives a soprano howl.
These two aren’t discussing climate change,
……….war, flu, layoffs; in this dialogue
a well-informed coyote’s not relaying
……….to a pessimistic dog
grounds for worry—national cases of mange,
……….the mountain lion population swelling,
a cougar-sighting fifteen miles away—
……….only a future close enough to smell.
Put a little pressure and heat on rock,
give it time, and shale turns into slate.
It’s the same with calcium carbonate
slowly reinventing itself as chalk.
Limestone’s in no hurry; it started to harden
during the Lower Jurassic into marble.
Graphite spends millennia on diamond:
The luxury of eons.
………………………………At any rate,
slow or slower, they move in mineral time
with plenty of leisure for maturing late.
Nice for them. I have a different clock,
skin-shallow. Animals can’t afford to wait.
Caenorhabditis elegans : genome sequenced
Ground-breaking news about the nematode
C. elegans—an even simpler beast
than they had thought, with a genetic code
nineteen percent identical to yeast.
And now I hear the sequencing machines
associate me with him—with vermin—by
festooning us in matching strands of genes:
A common heritage I can’t deny,
but a worm—he’s less than dirt, the über-low
doormat to the world, bred to submit
and never turn (except earth-clods), and so
unprepossessing. Except I’ve also read
how it’s supposedly the meek who hit
the jackpot—the big legacy—and earn
what great H. sapiens inherited:
the earth that elegans was first to turn.