Molly Peacock’s poem, “What’s Blue and Huge?”, appeared in the Winter 1985 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review and can be found via our archives.
The ocean’s great to look at
because there’s enough of it.
It’s like music, a substance that
can’t be cut up. It has no pit
to stymie a knife. It’s like true laughter:
even laughometers can’t measure it.
You can’t divide it in half, sure
to subdivide it in tracts.
Like scent, this way it will waft, or
that, diminished, but in fact
not divided. Everyone
in the world can watch: it will wax
and ebb for everyone.
It will crash on the beach, smell
acrid with brine, being for everyone
HUGE. It’s blue enough so everyone can tell
there’s blue enough. In this respect it is
not like love, not like a till
full of dollar bills, not like a kiss
or even many kisses, not
like food, like days, like jobs. It is
indivisibly vast and sufficient. What
else is like it? I can’t think, for
I am busy dividing: cut, cut.
Poverty says divide, not provide for.
It splits the core.
