Two Poems: Virginia Konchan
mont blanc The architecture of surveillance is clear, watching me watch myself pitch forward into space, knocking into objects, almost unable to breathe. I live in a city where, on December 6, 1917, a Norwegian vessel, SS Imo, collided with a French cargo ship, SS Mont Blanc, in the Narrows, a strait connecting the Atlantic harbor to the basin, thus releasing 2.9 kilotons of Trinitroluene: the largest human-made explosion to date, killing almost 2,000 people instantly and injuring another 9,000 who were within a half-mile radius of the blast. A shock wave traveling at 23 times the speed of sound snapped trees, bent iron rails, and wrecked buildings; a pyrocumulus cloud rose 12,000 feet in the air; and a tsunami, formed by water surging in to fill the void created when the harbor floor was exposed, carried what was left of the ships to shore, and wiped out a surrounding community. Halifax is haunted, a local resident told me, by all the souls displaced instantaneously when the Imo tried to pass Mont Blanc on
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T WO P OE M S
her starboard side, not port to port—the left. Despite several blows of the captains’ signal whistles to indicate who had the right of way, engines cut, the momentum was yet too strong, and the Imo’s prow struck Mont Blanc’s hold, breaking open barrels of benzol, which ignited. The frantic crew immediately abandoned ship, and shouted from their two lifeboats to the other nearby vessels, trying to warn them of the blast, but no one could hear them over the commotion, and even if they could, they were speaking French. Naivre de saut, I imagine they yelled: dépêche-toi. It’s a disaster to be lost in translation, they must have felt, crying out Elle va exploser . . . elle va.
V I RG I N I A KON C H A N
EPISTEMOLOGY So much I can’t know: my cat, is she staring at or through the window? Of what does she dream when she chatters nonsense to the birds; are her sounds a promise or a threat, and does she humor me, or I her when I murmur sweet nothings into the upturned conch of her ear: a pale pink, miniature, roving satellite? My little gladiola, golden harp, reason for continuance, hothouse English pea: if life would be so kind, I would serve you even better after dearth, pardon me, death. Je m’excuse, sickle cell anemia, Alzheimer’s, measles, shingles, leprosy, gout: ours was an overnight affair. Psalmist returned to singing, before whom nations kneel: it’s only when time is spent that I value it, baroque pearl. It’s only then, at world’s end, on some enchanted evening beneath empyrean skies that I know I’ll never die, and that only love is real.
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