60 for 60: The Floodmeadow
By Zachary Erickson
The fifty-ninth issue of Columbia Journal featured a poem by English poet Toby Martinez de las Rivas, and, as it so happens, I was given a copy of Rivas’s book Terror as a present at Christmas. In the interest of superstition, I felt I couldn’t not feature his poem; and, jokes aside, I like “The Floodmeadow.”
The poem speaks of a “debrided” angel, which, I believe, is a quite beautiful image for a moment at which plenty of people seem to feel that their usual holiday merriment has been dampened. And I value the image in general, because I think that Christmas, and angels in particular—which, I suspect, are no less frightening than any other extraterrestrial creatures—are too often sentimentalized. A poem that literally ends with “nothing,” that is infused with an apocalyptic tenor that also sounds a bit weary—I suspect that this is a fitting gesture for the end of an odd year and the beginning of a shining new future (in which one might dare to hope).
The Floodmeadow Toby Martinez de las Rivas The silhouettes of men are putting up a scaffold around the slowly rising shell of a house in the last field but one before the floodmeadow; deep melodic clanging of iron bars; boards deafening a rubber mallet; a voice that is untranslatable in the distance. Tenors of warning & approval, urgencies, the voice of the sun ringing from the surfaces of metals out through the air dim w/ pollen, the seed-bearing achenes of dandelion like parachutes, the far places shake in them, the verticals are blurred. The telegraph poles give off a hum of tar & creosote, silver pylons like titans marching over the hills holding bundles of wire studded w/ migratory swallows beneath their arms they will deliver beyond the horizon. & on Woodbury where we flew, pa, the balsawood chuckglider in the silence of the morning as the wind rippled through the grass like an archangel they have debrided the tranches of earth & the disarticulated bodies of men are staring up into the terrific deep blur of sky punctuated w/ clouds in the shapes of chariots, rings, a mirror, nothing.
