A Catalogue of Distances
BY ANNALISE LOZIER
Finalist for the 2019 Adroit Prize for Poetry
It was still months before she would learn
how to be ashamed of me; the day we stood together
on the banks of an unnamed creek. And the difference
grew between us. There was a sound,
a goose sound, I said, a squabbling, feathery neck. She said
it was a scream. That the presence of our ears
in that place obligated us. Here, where the moss
stood up in hills and fell into valleys
beneath us. We left and reentered
gravity as we walked, the path
that began behind four feet of rotting, blue fence
to the snout of grass where the creek was
cold and quick and the roots of trees
could be climbed down like a ladder. Whole trunks
greened with slime beneath the water, as holy and as silent
as a shipwreck. She took my hand.
These days, when I look for the creek on maps
to prove there was someplace she loved me,
that it split the highway and emptied
the lakes from left to right; there’s no overpass
even in memory. And the creek was just us
running. The cabin another hill crumbling
in the near distance. Through the broken screen door, a pair
of plastic sunglasses atop their rotted bureau. She cleared the spiders
from the lenses and set them on her nose.
When was the last time you lost
your breath? I asked. Two asthmatics in a river bed,
she said, and what do they ask?
Whether we are obliged to the thing that has cried
into the silence of this place. She gave no answer, just
the posthumous buildup to a punchline. Along
the bank. Past the snarl of branches,
the moving blanket with its moldy sheen, the decay
hanging heavy and sweet. On her skin. In the pocket
of her cheek. I lost her there, and waited
in the kind of aloneness that means nothing. The crayfish
green and the tadpoles silver. I took my shirt off
and my socks, went knee deep where the mud
cleared from my shins and I pulled snails
from their flat-bellied rocks. Where there was wonder
in the aloneness. In my pink bra and jean shorts
in the water torn clear of dust. An hour passed
and she returned to me, bearing in her arms
a chunk of ice, the size of a child’s head. From our premature
heat. We walked, and the geese lifted at once
from the creek. It didn’t take much
to set our world quaking, those days, she would tell me
how much she loved me, forgetting
that nothing can withstand expectation, least of all love.
Cradling her changeling’s head. And we quaked
as the birds took off. She wanted
to save the scream. I wanted her
to want to save me. Where the banks
turned to marsh, and we climbed the arched trunks
of fallen white birches. We held hands.
Bridging the water and its underlay
of leaves. A year from now I’ll think
that this is what happens
to girls who believe the land is their prophet. And ask
if she remembers the morning
the mist rolled out, and the stump whose mushrooms
outgrew it. If she wonders what snails
have since come to roost on the banks
of the unnamed creek.
But she’s off digging up someone
else’s spoons now, beneath another porch. Pushing on windows
from the outside, she sheds paint
but she doesn’t budge. I stepped from the spine
of the white birch, up to my ankles
and in my sneakers, and I held her hand
as she crossed from carcass
to carcass. She looked down to me.
I’m so young, she said, but I’ve been a creek
for all my life;
you are the water that flows through
me, and you’re the trash that’s left behind.
