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.