Pondhawk
I.
At night there’s a dream. In the morning the dream swims
across a murky pond. The surface is a tell-all source: although we try we can’t conceal
what’s going on beneath it.
The surface ripples out in rings around us.
A green-walled room is a pond.
A green-walled room is a dream.
We are strung like boats along its bank.
Our bellies sink. Our bellies resemble the sunken
earth of an unmarked grave.
When we leave, we leave the ground
that much more compacted.
II.
The heart is a cave poised in the cave of the heart.
Light defines its pools.
The heart turns white when you squeeze it.
I drive all night in the rain.
A finger with the blood rushed out.
The three flaps of the aorta open and close like a leaf-let.
III.
In the dream I see into the cave. I see into it sideways.
It is striated, like a canyon. Sedimentary.
Certain parts of it will fall away.
It looks equally like a burning log and like the inside of a glacier: kind of blue
and cavernous. In the sped-up evolution I see the cave reduced
to strings: stalactites and stalagmites. The copula connects the top to bottom.
IV.
So every beginning pulls in to its chest the idea of itself as an ending.
Isn’t it great we don’t have to talk about that?
The beauty of caves is knowing they were created in some kind of heat.
A hand on a thigh is a period.
A period is a hole.
The question remains.
Is this the hole in the web of holes that fills the cave, fills the basin, floods the town?
I don’t care about the ruins of towns.
To love what’s lost, decayed, abandoned.
When the water recedes it reveals not the thing, but the shape.
We call what’s been submerged a ruin. Resurfaced:
what’s been abandoned, deserted, becomes the idea.
A habitat for bats and birds.
Your hand is a chisel. I wanna crawl through
the abandoned cities of your heart.
V.
We wake up. A lattice-work of passion
laces up our necks. The skin’s a tight encasement.
The skin’s an elaborate web of veins.
In the alley, trumpet vines tangle around one another.
Years exist but I don’t know that.
I lose my edges underwater.
The vines continue, twisted and tedious, long after the host
has died away. The surface shivers, a horse
agitating a fly. You’re the pond
I lie beside. I land on you in the stone-still morning.
I gaze across the pond, adjacent to it.
Mary Helen Callier is a current MFA candidate at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of the chapbook Spring and Stuff (dancing girl press, 2018).