after Iris Cushing
I am a lake of very small things
sealed: frozen
fishhooks, car gears, cans, airplanes,
what knives I’ve held…
When they swim to my center, they see
the worth of my walked-on water.
It thins. Their wrists
have nails. I’m swallowed up
upon the surface this lake reconciles
around. My hard magnet lie.
Because tailbone tunnels
crimped against winter
carve through to thermoclines I cannot
place until spring parts the ice’s side…
Because my heels make another
head press down in
to the powerful melt…
This same lake was an age
of ice. The dark discarded
shore starts and thins
to it. Otis Redding pulls
smooth thickness through
the underside of that effort
by which he draws
heat beneath the air I died in.
This poem samples and rearranges words from Iris Cushing’s poem “Because This Winter I Am the Same Age Otis Redding Was When He Died” from her book Wyoming (Furniture Press, 2014).
