I'm going to read a poem that's a bit longer,
and that is not triggered by the Science Times,
but from a trip that my husband Harold and I
took as we were driving West, and through Tennessee.
We noticed that there was Sweetwater caverns on our map
as we were driving through.
And we wanted to see the world's second-largest underground
lake, so we did.
"The Sweetwater Caverns."
"Curious to see caverns, we detoured in Tennessee
to ramble through Fat Man's Misery,
past a ballroom and gunpowder machine,
till we reached The World's Second Largest Underground
Lake, on which my husband had promised
a ride in a glass-bottom boat.
There, a kid hunched over a hot rod magazine.
Dan, I think his name was, radiant,
in clammy, artificial light.
I asked Dan, college break?
He nodded inside his hoodie, then helped me
into the glass-bottom hold.
I peered into the milky water, and watched
the seeded trout swim up for the chum he dumped over
on our account.
He was milky white, himself, from months of cave sitting.
I wondered if he'd write a poem on a summer spent underground.
Thought to suggest it--
how foolish-- then wondered if what I really wanted was Dan,
as I stepped into his boat, to take my arm and ask me
something at this middle age, probably for a couple coins,
then give me a promise of safe passage as he ferried me
to the realm of the dead that I've been thinking about
for several years not because of a girlfriend's cancer,
but because my body is no longer young--
I mean, lovely-- and that there's no turning back
to that water's edge.
There's only the couch every afternoon at 4 o'clock,
and not wanting to ever move.
Not wishing to die, exactly, just not
wanting to rise because the light feels so pressured.
And I can't have that ardent glow
reflected back while brushing my teeth or fastening a necklace.
Now there's this casting around for other stuff, the daughter's
secrets, the pathetic urge to write about their secrets,
or a crush on Charon.
Not an old man, as it turns out, but a youth,
colorless, and tired of his iPod.
No, he's not really of interest to me.
And this is my secret--
that I wish he were, as with those arms
reaching through clouds of cigarette
smoke to lead me into reeking dives.
I'm past that.
And he, Dan, not the poetic Charon,
will probably climb out of the caverns
into the 6 o'clock evening sun, stretch, change his shirt,
eat his mother's meatloaf, and head off
in a rusted Honda for the Piggly-Wiggly parking
lot with a six-pack and a girl, those hand-sized moths flitting
in the light as the sheriff chases
the kids to another dead end spot,
those enormous dusty moths my husband caught
for me to hold in my hand because he knows,
in the afternoon light after the dank caverns,
how fluttery the furry wings will feel,
which is more than melodrama can bear.
To have wished for Dan, to 'ask me something,' I know
'the passage' is not what you wanted to hear."