Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Matt Robinson 

Apology’s often a thin, callous eye—an aperture’s squint-
slurred re-framing of the arc of a day’s bright complaint
with its breaker. It’s a matter of naming. A smudged sliver of
a thought’s cataract; a wry pseudo-erasure, a narrative
weaning. Like love, a fervid translation—a fraught, stuttered attempt 
to mitigate loss or gloss over the making of meaning; a review
of what has or hasn’t been said, of what’s been cut
on the bias or cut to the quick. It’s an ad hoc sheet music—loosely 
transcribed—of an elegant logic’s new bridge. Or chorus. Or verse.
Even worse, the time signature’s as good as gone, clearly missing—
heart’s tacky, over-used cardiac snare the only thing there
to establish what we’d wish as a rhythm to serve as this fugue’s counterpoint, 
to punch up this now jaundiced tune—this near-sighted, one-sided
limning of what it is we’ve been living.