Lynne Thompson – Still Life Without Sirens

Thompson LE P&W 1 Nov-Dec 2024

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One November-December 2024

Still Life Without Sirens, poems by Lynne Thompson.


Still Life Without Sirens

Kingdom of Lahaina
August, 2023

Then, again, a siren is a mythical
monster—half woman, half bird—

a proxy for the dangers of desire
and risk. You think you want to live

by the sea under an old banyan tree
with no natural defenses for fighting

flames, or with those with no time to
recall where that banyan came from?

Do you want to return to your seaside
home charred beyond knowing?

Where we come from, our ancestors
recall with no small bit of remorse

what they once declined to teach us—
do not wait for the horn, for the euphonium.

You may like to snorkel and surf, wear
headphones master-blasting M. Gaye’s

who really cares? while the smoldering &
ashes and departed reign above the foam.

But remember the sirens’ lure to Odysseus
who, to save his men from crash & perish,

inveigled them to silence their ears even as
the sirens called; as O. gave way to madness.


Rare, Glistening

Everything lives in memory—boxes of trick-
or-treat paper cuts, daguerreotypes, door
keys fit for no doors, tear-soddened letters
too lovely to be tossed. It cannot be put

into words and yet memory searches itself,
recalls taffeta as a sound like no other when
you’re fifteen, untouched, the new taste of
champagne from Bar-sur-Seine on your lips.

Nothing like those firsts gives even one clue
about a California autumn afternoon, rain
washing away everything that was there just
hours before, leaving—as though centuries

were minutes—an elm, most of its growth given
up to the season, the remainder glistening, grey-
green emeralds in pale sunlight unwilling to set,
the idea of them more beautiful than any language.


In this version, a fish

grows inside me because fish have grown
inside me since I was a girl. Because I was a girl who could not name species,
no one believed me when I said scales and my stomach hurts. The family said
Pepto-Bismol. They said Cod Liver Oil and I spit all of it into the fireplace thinking
spit burns. Spit does not burn. Amazing, yes?—what burns, what does not burn.

Shortly after I learned about the
paradoxes of fire, I began to grasp the splendid nomenclature of fish: Pacific
lamprey, green sturgeon, threadfin shad. When I shared my oceanic beliefs, our
head-of-household raised both her eyebrows while opening a can of Chicken of
the Sea, proudly wearing her apron and fossilized lack of imagination…

…but I had already
swallowed the bones of a flannelmouth sucker set atop the parsley on my plate
because children in China go to bed hungry although it wasn’t such a stretch to
imagine that at least one of those bones expelled itself from my body and found
a way to re-spawn in the Columbia River so I could get this interview and glossy
cover on Scientific American. So I can tell everyone what I know: this is an
understanding of the sea….


© Lynne Thompson

Lynne Thompson was Los Angeles’ 2021-22 Poet Laureate and a Poet Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of four collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, Start With A Small Guitar, Fretwork, and most recently Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA Editions, 2024). A recipient of the George Drury Smith Award for Achievement in Poetry and 2024 representative of Los Angeles at the Marathon Poétique in Paris as part of the Olympic Games, Thompson sits on the Boards of Cave Canem, the Poetry Foundation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, and Gulf Coast, among others.

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