Boil

By Alicia Ostriker b. 1937 Alicia Ostriker

Boil over—it’s what the nerves do,

Watch them seethe when stimulated,

Murmurs the man at the stove

To the one at the fridge—

Watch that electric impulse that finally makes them

Fume and fizz at either

Frayed end. If you could grasp a bundle

Of nerves in your fist like a jumper cable, and sense that

Python’s writhe, or a garden hose when the pressure’s

High and it wilfully weaves about

Trying its best to get away from you—

You’d see how nothing is passive,

We’re all—I mean from our elephant sun, ejaculant

Great-grandfather, cascading down

To weightless

Unstoppable neutrinos

Leaving their silvery trace

In vacuum chambers, in

Effervescent lines, twisted

Madly in our madhouse jackets,

Rules, laws, which we are seething to break

Though to rupture them might be of course to die,

Or, possibly,

To change:

Boil, it’s what water

And everything else teaches.

Alicia Ostriker, “Boil” from The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998. Copyright © 1998 by Alicia Ostriker. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, upress.pitt.edu. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: The Little Space: Poems Selected and New 1968-1998 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998)

Biography

Poet, critic, and activist Alicia Ostriker was born in 1937 in New York City. She earned degrees from Brandeis and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Twice a finalist for the National Book Award, Ostriker has published numerous volumes of poetry, including The Book of Seventy (2009), which received the Jewish National Book Award. Other books of poetry include No Heaven (2005); The Volcano Sequence (2002); Little Space (1998), . . .

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