Cimarrón
The first permanent colonial settlers of what is
now North America were three male slaves who
ran away from a Spanish settlement in what is
now South Carolina and were forever free after
the Spanish could no longer stand the malaria
and sailed back home. The Spanish used the
word cimarrón to refer to slaves who escaped to
go live with the Natives. Cimarrón was also the
name of their cattle. It is the origin of the English
word “maroon.” As in, to be marooned on an
alien planet. I wonder if any of them married. If
lovers sang them sweet, sad things by the flicker
of low firelight. If they felt like they’d been
marooned or if they felt like explorers. If they
stood on high hilltops and stared into distances
that seemed positively soaked with mystery.
Brother Armin Speaks To God
There was a city in what is now Eastern Turkey
called Ani. It was known as the City of 1001
Churches and those churches shepherded
100,000 souls. If you look now — a single
cathedral in a grassy plain, scatterings of walls
and stone. Something out of Byron or Shelley.
Ani was conquered an unusual number of
times. By the mid-17th century the population
consisted of five monks living in a ruined
monastery. One day they left. Dry grass
crunched beneath their feet, kindling for the
next wildfire. They carried a young crippled
brother and took turns on the task. He watched
the towers and rooftops pass through his sight.
They forded the river into Armenia and the
banks were thick with bushes and thorny vines
that tore their robes. They passed an abandoned
pup, its eyes not yet open. It nosed the air and
whimpered. As Brother Armin brought a rock
down on its head a ten-thousand strong flock of
starlings took to the skies around the city and
spelled the true name of God several hundred
years too late to have any effect on the course of
human history. The brothers walked on and
passed the time singing songs of things they
already did not know to be truth or legend.
Algebra
The courtyard of the House of Wisdom by
moonlight. The air pregnant with lamp oil and
jasmine flowers. Stars seem to crash into
Baghdad rather than rise. A literal starfall. They
come in waves. Muhammad ibn Musa al-
Khwarizmi watches them through the lamp
smoke. Outside, somewhere in the fractal
streets, someone plays an oud and sings of a lost
lover. Ordinarily, al-Khwarizmi would know
that this is all of God. The jasmine, the stars, the
music. What else but God the pain of an absent
lover, the chords on strings? Often on the roof
the geometric tile patterns in moonlight send
him into seizing ecstasy. Tonight, though, he is
fractured. Earlier, he watched a grim little
goblin of a man beat a pony to death with a club
for its refusal to move. And al-Khwarizmi did
not shake that image in the House, or its library,
or the baths. There are places where the world
is yet broken into parts, he said to his assistant,
who brought him mint tea in the moonlit
courtyard. Broken and but for any ways my
love might be flawed I would bring them back
into reunion.
Persistence
The last woolly mammoth died 3,600 years ago.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was already a
thousand years old and there were still
mammoths. All of the other mammoths died out
during the last Ice Age but a tiny colony survived
on a small island north of Siberia and due to
something called insular dwarfism they became
very small. The last ones were only about three
feet tall and weighed a couple hundred pounds.
They told stories, though. They watched the
Aurora Borealis and told their children that once
they were giants. Mighty and strong and the
earth shook for them. They would gather on
hilltops and look south and raise their trunks
and call out to the world: We’re still here! We’re
still here! You aren’t done with us yet! We are
small but we persist!
Will O’ The Wisp
It is December of 1929. New York. I imagine the
air thick with champagne corks. Jazz in Harlem.
Okay. This is best I can do. Harry Crosby is
sitting in a Manhattan apartment. He is ready to
kill something beautiful so it does not grow old.
He is doing this for us. So we will not grow old,
either. Music drifts up to the window from a
phonograph in a café. The clarinet tones beat
themselves against the falling snow as they rise.
The air suddenly becomes a flock of pigeons that
merge with the smoke from the brownstone
rooftops. Harry checks the mirror to make sure
the world is watching. I am. We are. His true love
waits for him on the bed with a heart that beats
like a countdown. She raises her eyes to him as
he crosses the floor to the bed. We can’t wait
any longer. Poetry is a gun.
CRAIG FINLAY is a poet and librarian currently living in rural Southern Oklahoma, by way of a several decades-long tour of the Rust Belt. His poems have appeared in dozens of journals and zines, most recently Poetry South, Sheila-Na-Gig, The Windsor Review and Belt Magazine. His debut collection, “The Very Small Mammoths of Wrangel Island,” is forthcoming from Urban Farmhouse Press in January 2021.
Twyckenham Notes 