Splintering

Another poem from IDA:

Splintering

 

Blue sky, green water.  All day, I tell children

about bacterial reefs in the 195-foot-deep lake.  I am

not thinking about you.  I rarely do, you

across the state with another woman, me here alone

in the wind.  Golden armadas of leaves drift on green

water, slicing blue reflections with the spines of their prows. 

Bobbing hourglass gulls erase my sense of time.  Then you

crash your silver plane into the frozen expanse.  Snow

drifts through a fireball of flame.  But that isn't

the way it was.  Last time we were here, my breast hatched

a purple ostrich egg.  Only that was later, of course.  Later,

after you plane sank through the ice.  A terrible stench,

steam rising.  But no, that's now.  5,500 lost, instead

of only us, our love.  Days after the accident,

after the white-out, after the accordion song of crumpling

silver, I turned purple.  Grew three breasts, then four.

Last time we were here, my breast bone split down the middle,

with a tearing snap.  And you reached through the tear

and squeezed, clenching my heart in your fist.  Swore

I killed your silver bird with my laughter.  Your metal

darling, your winged steed.  Gone.  Like I was gone, though

I stood beside you invisible in the snow.  I remember

the explosion, the splintering bone and glass, how slippery

your breath was afterwards, how cold

your tongue.  Children, thrilled to run their fingers

around the rectangular shapes of pileated wood-pecker

holes in cedars by the lake, have all been carried

away by yellow buses.  The sun is a holocaust of flame,

a furnace on platinum waves.  Shadows race

toward my feet.  I hear old laughter, born

of white fear with its hidden tinder of steel.  You

grin beside me on this bench.  Invisible,

but not to me.

 

 

 

 

Mary Stebbins

For Chuck

3C, 10-11-01; 2nd, 10-5-01, NY/Mass line, on way to Maine; 1st 10/3/01 on bank of Green Lake

P014A:  splinter.doc, 011005

--
I am certain of nothing but the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination- John Keats
Mary