Algal Bloom
Some kids across the reservoir are smoking weed
under a fir bough. They think it hides them.
The water is green as the old statue of Joan
in the park, a bright and aged copper,
and it ripples, trying to wriggle
out of itself, settle into some better shape.
The reservoir basin hums, every so often,
with the exclamations of stoned teenagers,
and I’m playing hooky, lying on my back
among the blackberry tearing through the ivy
and the soft mossy treble clefs of wild grasses.
It’s hard to explain how I suddenly know this,
the way I know the taste of that fetid water
against my ribs, but I remember now that
I loved before I knew what it meant.
I tasted it briefly in the hills above Florence
where I used to walk in September heat
as flies buzzed in the straw-grass,
preening over some boy who wrote poetry,
as if that landscape, with its old stone walls
and trees as dark as coal-nubs, were appropriate
for that kind of crush. Then, exhausted by the odors
of my own sifting, restless body, I would climb at dusk
above the city where monks lived and sit alone
in the stone-dark dust of the cathedral until
voices came like moths, white-winged
and hoary and beautiful, out of the grates
below the apse. Not heavenly but thick
with the dust of the crypt and the heavy
brass notes of medieval songs, chanted for
centuries by lonely men with crumbling books,
their voices in search of the darkness
beyond the obvious light.
For it’s not obvious, how I came to love a child
I’ve never met. It hasn’t been hidden, just unimportant,
like the plaque at the bottom of historical statues,
or how many legs the iron horse is lifting, as if
whether the person fell in battle, or died of cholera
or was burned at the stake would matter
to some kids getting high a century later.
Still, despite my lack of attention,
the pleasure of listening drew me back.
It slid across my eyes at night,
a moon-coin paying my passage back come morning.
It was an old currency worn into faceless grooves
and wordless slogans, a comfort to rub again
and again in thoughtless moments.
After all, the moon can change and change
and look so familiar; the sea wrestles itself
into a new shape, ever-young but never new.
But the algal bloom is still, thick but not stagnant,
a body finished with its spurts, letting the ease
of symbiosis creep over its exposed surface.
Waiting there long enough to be over azure
and beauty and shimmering and all that.
Waiting there for the sound of darkness
on the concrete walls.
No one ever taught me how to pray.
It doesn’t matter, does it; I know the coppery
burst on the tongue, the sense of rest, as if
I were listening to someone play harmonica,
some tune I can’t quite recall, but before
the next note comes, I can sing it.
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Stitches
In the story I was telling you, a young boy
was scrubbing his feet with a bar of soap.
He yearned to stick to himself.
He needed a mother, to sew on his shadow
with a children’s needle, thread the eye
with her tongue out. Boy, she said, Why are you crying? Tiny knots
make dark ripples against the wound,
he could have said, or how dumbly
the shadow flops, I need stitches
to reclaim my skin. Peter Pan knew
his shade writhed in sun’s glare, knew
to suds it on would suture himself home.
Alas for the slipperiness. I daresay
it will hurt a little. We cannot live
without a shadow self, my father claimed
at one point, as if this were helpful,
as if I did not already have smudges
under my fingernails from digging
at the night-drapes, the bleak bulk
of the stars outside. I counted the hours
I was away from you each night, counted
the number of life flights each day.
The blades slicing open the sky.
Each slippery hour. My scar was long
and puffy-pink, a knife’s quick work:
weeping half-moon contour. Pan’s scars
were on his tippy-toes, quick ticks.
Your incision is in your neck, seven or eight
loops of string slender as geese in Vs.
High migrations. Wounds in the sky
after they depart, calling. Below, the artery
severed and neatly tied off, like a gift.
It gave you life, that knotted ending, me
a hook for a heart, a crooked sharp
fear of clocks. As if he had been clipped
at every joint. He fell in a little heap.
In the bath, we suds the bindings:
little black twigs plucked from pink skin.
How I mourn them. How we both flinch
in noon’s bracing light.
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Caitlin Dwyer writes narrative nonfiction and poetry. She holds a Master of Journalism from the University of Hong Kong and an MFA in Poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her poetry has been published in places like Intima, Stirring, Notre Dame Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. Her essays have appeared in Longform, Narratively, Creative Nonfiction, Tricycle, and more. She was the 2021-2022 Writer-in-Residence at Portland Community College in Oregon. Read more of her work at caitlindwyer.com.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 