We will enter Lake Huron only to become, and: Neighborly, and: To Reclaim

Abstract

We will enter Lake Huron only to become, and: Neighborly, and: To Reclaim Martha Rhodes (bio) We will enter Lake Huron only to become wet and cold; blue our skin, shivering our lips.We’ll expect to disappear since neither canswim well, nor float. Instead, we will appearlarger through water, our thighs unrecognizable thoughon land each cell familiar to us. I’ll reach down to touch bottom with my handsand startle to see blood streaming from my feet,cut by the sharp shells. I will feel nothing.Where else to go to no longer be? Still visible,Matthea will drift farther and farther from me. I’ll remember an old friend’s storyof her farm in Indiana, outside of Bloomington,riddled with sinkholes, her horse escapingits confines and disappearing into one, allbut its ears. But where exactly is her farm? I will wave Matthea back to shore wherewe will dry ourselves with our hands,towelless, not having expected to ever returnto land. We’ll just have to find that farm,she’ll say. We’ll have to find those sinkholes.Do you think we can cram into one?All those horses and cows and goats and maybeyour friend and her barn, disassembled plankby plank, thrown in, no trace of herabove-ground life. We will consider our nearly [End Page 33] dead car. Will it survive the drive to Bloomington?The sinkholes of Provincetown! Matthea will suggest.They are closer and vast—all those desperate fishermendesperately swallowed. Desperation will have long sincedisappeared from our lives, barely remembered— replaced by exhaustion over a bland, content existence,our dullness, our unable-to-be-surprisedtaste buds. How unspectacular we’ve become, Mattheawill often say. Unspectacular to each other, our neighbors,our colleagues. To God, Matthea will proclaim. And suddenly, God will flood our brains. To God, we are not spectacular;we are less than a grain of sand. To God, we have alreadydisappeared. How ashamed we will feel to occupy even onemillimeter of space in this world, to breathe in its air, crush grassand insects underfoot. We will realize, at shore’s edge, that our guilt, if we allow it to, will weigh us down effectivelyand so we will decide to reenter the lake, overflowing we arewith our guilt at our individual and joint insignificance and wewill ask each other’s forgiveness for allowing our lives to becomeso unremarkable as to be unbearable. We will realize that we have disappeared not only to God but to each other. And wewill sink and sink until we do not remember each other’s names.Matthea once said to me, in the mist of our shower, my breastsin her hands, I worry that you might look at me one day and notremember my name. Can you imagine not remembering my name? Not remembering your own name? Disappearing from your own mind? [End Page 34] Neighborly We invited them over, from their fields to ours.To join us naked and playful, to give themhope. To watch us joyfully trample our own lands—and witness the greening anew overnight.Our fields. Paid for, no mortgages—To join us in and outside of our tents of celebration,and share our jungles and waterfalls. But when we woke, nothing.Even the tents while we slumberedgone. Our dogs. Our shoes. To Reclaim Our just appointed soldiers follow the Charles from Millis to Needhamin search.We follow them as scouts.Our dogs strewn on the wayside, shot and gutted.A scarf some recognize as their own. No otherclues. I wish to go away from life today,join the dogs’ rotting.Everything hurtling sideways away from and at me. One of us ahead yells, Look!And I peer into a ditch:minutest leavings of stars—stillfuming, skitteringand I know I can begin again.But will I? [End Page 35] Martha Rhodes Martha Rhodes is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Thin Wall (U of Pitt P). She is the director of Four Way Books. Copyright © 2020 University of Nebraska...