DREAM ELEGY
We don’t speak. I climb into his truck as if guided by an invisible
hand, as if we've known
each other our whole lives. And we have. The rain picks up
as we drive, and the street signs
change color, then shape. When we reach the turn-off, the road
is light grey, almost translucent,
like a worn-out piece of paper. He leads me up the concrete steps
and into the house.
I take it all in: The paint-wrecked furniture. The slurry for casting,
sand melted down in a fluidized bed, shelves lined
with bronze objects. Backyard overrun with scrap metal and half-
finished sculptures.
An electricity moves between us, as if time were a map
that’s been leading me back to this town
made peaceful by rain, and all those years without him
seem like a joke, bruised and piled
together like plums in a bowl. Outside, he throws open the garage
to show me his father’s Corvette,
which he’s kept in good condition. It sparkles like a dark forest,
the rear-view mirrors
like miniature lakes. I remember our long rides through wealthy
neighborhoods, how his dad
let me and Anna hang off the back of the convertible and slide
around turns, the mansions
boring compared to the bounce and burn of the speeding car.
Hop in, he says, and I do.
I feel safe with him, whooshing along the back-roads, the secret
of our childhood a rope between us,
so when we stop at the cemetery and get out to walk, I stay close
at his side. What is it like,
I ask him finally, when we reach the headstone with his name
on it. Lilies have grown up
around the grave, and he picks one and puts it in my hair.
It’s quiet, he says. His hand
is huge on top of mine. His loneliness moves through my body
like a pulse, and I can’t remember
whether it was prescription pills or heroin, suicide or an accident. It
doesn’t matter anymore.
In this version, he’s alive. We have our whole lives ahead of us.
FROZEN WATER
I never touched you
first.
Snow fell forever
in that room
and the heater moaned
in the electrical closet. For both of us,
there existed a boundary
between the mind
and the body.
That was the sort of love
we liked.
You gave me poems
that spoke
to the ways in which
love fails us,
though you were happy
with your husband.
At night I lay in bed
a few blocks
away, listening
to the crinkle
of ice cracking
at the windows.
I wrote your name
on the ceiling,
stared at it
like a glow-in-
the-dark star.
You had a silver streak
in your hair
like my mother’s.
The rest of your hair was black.
Maybe it was my mother
I longed to recover.
Maybe I was the daughter
you’d lost.
But later
it wasn’t like that.
One winter
I drove to the lake
alone and walked out
on the ice.
The highway home
was covered in a thin layer
of frozen water,
and my car slid out
into a snow bank. I survived
and didn’t mind. I hated existing
in time. One day
I would have to live in the world
without you.
I remember the white kitchen,
the blue tile floor.
Your tea cupboard
had every flavor.
I could never make up my mind
so you chose for me.
It wasn't a secret.
Sometimes
I slept over. In the morning
the tea leaves
were still there
curled in water, and steam rose
off the snow
in shapes
we had no name for.
Catherine Pond's book, Fieldglass, won the Crab Orchard First Book Award in Poetry (judge: Traci Brimhall) in 2019, and is forthcoming with Southern Illinois University Press in 2021. She is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, and holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2013. She is co-founder of the online literary magazine Two Peach (with Julia Anna Morrison). Catherine lives in Los Angeles.