Dirt and Light by Aria Aber

Dirt and Light

 

Last night it startled me again—I dreamed

of the corn maze through which we walked,

almost a decade ago, in the presence

of our other lovers. It was all burned down.

Purple corn glowed in the fields enveloping

the ruined maze, the woodlands washed

by October sun. Instead of you, I found in the salt-white music

of that familiar landscape an old piano, hollowed

by the draft of time, and the handle of a porcelain cup

in scorched soil. Relics of an imagined,

civil life. Today, in the lemony light by your grave,

I recited Merrill: Why did I flinch? I loved you, then touched

the damp and swelling mud, blue hyacinths

your mother planted there—

ants were swarming the unfinished plot of earth

like the black text of an infinite alphabet. I couldn’t

read it. There was no epiphany, just dirt, the vast curtain

between this realm and the other. You never speak to me,

I thought, not even in dreams.

For hours, I sat there, mocked by the bees—

silly girl, their golden faces laughed, she still wants

and wants. A warm gust shook the trees,

and a pigeon settled into the dusk

of a wet pine, and then another.