POETRY

Ordinary Dream

By Supritha Rajan     VOLUME 52.4

Vertical Divider



All night, our minds stilled
by rainfall, we studied the curve
that marks the difference

between bank and river-purl
and in the sloping
shape of its back, from the earth’s

starlit minerals and tangled roots,
built a bark so
small that, on climbing in--

you holding the oars and I
our son to my chest--
it was unclear

in that predawn blue
whose limbs the light laundered.
Worry, in such proximity,

proved the instinctive form
of attachment. We
dared not look behind

at the flaring waters nor below
at the pebbled face that spied us
but rowed further and further

back into that ordinary dream
in which, because nothing happens,
no one ever leaves. We slept,

we ate plums, we grew small
then smaller. The curve
of our bodies

the only curve
that held us.
By the time you said

let’s turn back
it was too late. Flesh
to leaf, leaf to root.

That we wanted to leave,
only partially the point. That we
could not stay, better argument.

 






SUPRITHA RAJAN lives in Rochester, N Y.


VOLUME 52.4