Thursday at the Threshold: Repetition
Marie Scarles | Poetry
I’m back at the man-made lake listening
to the squirrels shuffle in the crisp leaves,
& the sound of jays overhead,
calling out to one another.
To get here I walked past the apartment
your father lived in when we met
& another we looked at together
on Ocean Avenue. There,
we thought of you, before you were
a force under my skin, measuring
closets and bedrooms in our heads,
asking questions about the neighbors &
how did the former tenants hitch
a washing machine to the sink with a tube?
Always, there is what we make & how
we make do: the fragile balance
like the orange boat that floats across the water
to dredge up waterlogged junk from lake-bottom,
the roaming goat churning its mills &
past reeds on the far shore.
Last night, after my midwife swiped her gloved hand
within my cervix to separate
uterus from your amniotic skin
& after only tiny spots of blood
across the tiles, it was clear
that it was not this that would invite you
to enter the atmosphere of this unwatered world.
Instead, I walked to a restaurant & drank
a salty broth of miso soup with ramen noodles &
slick spoonfuls of chili oil, garlic
floating at bowl’s brim. I cast off this state of waiting,
cast it back into the atmosphere of late autumn.
There I will walk across the park with you—
the day comes closer—where yesterday I walked
with a friend & lamented the nation.
I cast my gaze across the rippling lake
back to where this land began as glacial kettle’s
rocky shore, where before
when the lands were ice-covered,
creatures roamed who had
names only for each other,
the sound of which cannot be imagined
by the likes of us, just as I cannot imagine
the pitch of your call, which soon—
the day comes closer—
will come to us as sure as falling water,
casting out into the darkness of our bedroom
(so cool, so blue, an atmosphere you
simply can’t imagine)
to make our world anew.
Marie Scarles is a writer, maker, and movement worker from the marshlands of Mystic, Connecticut, living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published in The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, About Place Journal, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University.