Gharial

The bump-snouted mouth of the gharial

yaws to reveal

a silent avenue beneath an ice-white ceiling, 

lined with shining, orderly gods 

whose only son is hunger.

Here the law is handed down

to hesitant fish mostly, 

though on the banks of the Ganges 

where great fires burn through the night

they say the gharial, eeling through shallows, 

accepts without prejudice the bodies of the dead.

Or once did. Wild numbers

have collapsed

and outside the Chambal children think it myth.

A hundred years from now

only a handful of zoogoers will gaze 

down the clean shock of this gullet.

An awful measure of beauty is wasted

on those who have died or are about to—

the gleaming throat,

the shivering petals of flame 

that bloom on the riverbank.

Still, why should the mouth not resemble a temple,

a monument where stones our own hands placed 

pierce a thinning sky to let eternity through?

Site of deliverance—

not for the fish, 

for the gharial.

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Mary Fontana

Mary Fontana grew up in central Washington state and trained as a malaria immunologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Seneca Review, The Seattle Review, Crab Creek Review, Rust + Moth, Kestrel, SWWIM Everyday, Moss, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.