Monica Berlin & Beth Marzoni
Where we stand, here a line of doors
pulling in walls, & a low-ceilinged not quite
cloud around our heads, almost
window-less light—artificial, yellowed—or nothing
to throw open, no curtained-breeze, no patch of sun
to catch dust or afternoon & nothing floating
near invisible. So & So, every wide-open expanse—
even the ones only day-dreamed stretch &
endless—narrows, overnight tapering into
pass-through. Where impassable begins then changes
names to make the acres a sea; where the fields still
winter-slack & fallow fill; where once crop, wave
after wave: all our small towns sodden. Where
will empty or breach, or blown open then clear
heavy-wet. & no wonder that barn
in deep, those houses up to sill, & how
impossible the trees again & still bare, that
emptied out or flooded changes nothing of any importance
just our startled view. How impossibly estranged the natural
geometry of branches & sky sharpened then doubled
by moonlight by water by water. Where bare,
not bereft but themselves, winter lingers into the long &
lonely, into the darkened & lapping now. & when
we say stand, say here, we mean suddenly night-blind
washed-out road. We mean nothing’s concealed
from the river by the river’s own
full & fearsome name—that gathering in of all the waters—
& its shapes. This banks. This temporary. We clear
the bend ahead somehow, well, So, only
high ground can keep a kind
of distance, only hill or bluff, but we’d rather
humble. So flood plain. Set us adrift
on that widening erasure, deep disguised
as another sky & laid down to quiet so many
sorrows, & undone their boundary lines carry off, temper
such passing. Tamped down & waterlogged
pockets of all our lousy grief shushed by the rising, again,
the breach again, the rain again, & again clouds over navigable.
—
Took on nearly the length of the river & almost as much water
to turn again, north pronounced moonless,
road slicked dizzying dark as
logjam, drift. These veins we’ve driven.
Our own hearts & again—that long-ago
stitched into interstate & exchange, what pulls
at us, So, now. That no sky yawns wide enough.
That no number of state lines downpour can
wash out. Not that empty rooms
wait, but that echo that says history,
says what we build—. Took on sea
level, city where the sidewalks call
their own names. Dear city hums a city
at work framed by open doors. Took on
so much un-walled, so much open
to street & air, the most
open always tucked farthest inside. Sometimes
city of overheard & accent. Sometimes city
underwater. Maybe we came to you thinking we
could blueprint the future, but took instead
what we sensed all along: anywhere without
apology the sky will open up & keep
opening; the river will turn
quiet & deep & then deeper.
Monica Berlin & Beth Marzoni‘s collaborations have appeared or are forthcoming in Better: Culture & Lit, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Meridian, and New Orleans Review, among others. Their book, No Shape Bends the River So Long, won the 2013 New Measure Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Free Verse Editions at Parlor Press.