As if your grief was another potato
to clean and peel— and not
the volcanic lake stuck in your gut—
a hole
thousands of years old, cooled
stillness left after earth belched its fire.
Three or four boat lengths from the shore,
the water drops bottomless, I learned
as a child, why it’s cold and clear
though it swallows everything
lost—
your wife child friend lover neighbor brother sister—
I come to you mute,
a dog pawing language
pulsing in the cells of the heart.
I do not know
but I too had a mother, father—
here is my match to light the water.
Here is my quilt to cover the deep.
deep is the skin of the world
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 6.
Mermer Blakeslee is the author of three novels, Same Blood (Houghton Mifflin), In Dark Water (Ballantine), a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and When You Live by a River, an excerpt of which won the Narrative Prize. Drawing on her work with fearful students as a professional ski teacher, she wrote A Conversation with Fear (formerly In the Yikes! Zone, Dutton). She was awarded three fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Blakeslee was born, raised and still lives in New York’s Catskill Mountains.
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