Lost in Space
There are galaxies inside me,
interstellar stars and dust.
I am full of dark matter,
quarks and spirals
of deep love that cannot
be seen with the naked eye,
lives that might have been
different under other alignments.
Somewhere amid black holes
and the absorption of light,
beyond the mass of Milky Way,
there’s a distant room:
the walls covered with faded flowers,
a meadow of flecked sunlight,
where a child lies beneath
a bleached quilt in a narrow bed
dreaming of a boat
with a single blue sail,
a boat that will take her home.
Lake
and even with all the forgiving the being
in this moment and this following every
tilt and shift of the world the stillness of snow
the seeping of grey dawn over the grimy sill
the curdy light of the city and its stale breathing
it’s then I think of that dark lake the trees
leaning out over its black mirrored skin
fringed with purple loosestrife that grows
along the edge of slow moving water
the bulrushes reflected in its anthracite
depths and imagine diving down and down
into that icy water through duckweed
and pools of green algae watermeal
and water hyacinths milfoil and hydrilla
to be caught in tendrils of curly-leaf pond weed
then on deeper still past clasping-leaf
pondweed with its thin and delicate oval
shaped leaves that are wide and wavy
coontail that lacks any true roots and the naiad
and sago pondweed to where light ceases
downwards with this cold seal body
towards that lost thing that special thing
I know is there in the muddy depths
till I can no longer go on holding my breath
Those Far Blue Hills
I have become a connoisseur of roads,
having grown weary of anticipation,
of waiting too long in the dark hours
for whispered promises and midnight calls.
Now I take this solitary journey
down hidden byways and lanes, hauling this horse-hair body
towards those far blue hills and stagnant dykes,
the shifting sands and impatient cities.
Longing for wilderness I’ve become a storyteller
of absence and loss, though all travel
is a form of return as well as departure.
Between barren islands and bare rocks
I trek this narrow path without
losing sight of the stony shore,
where a white haar draws in
across the purple sky
and this journey ceases.
Copyright © Sue Hubbard 2021