Going Under
       

The meat inside the earth is packed
material, though sometimes there's space,
an opal darkness where a river underground
once gouged tunnels and rooms,
a dry bed where I passed a hardened waterfall,
passed mineral flowers and slick pillars growing
drop by sticky drop—the life of darkness
mushrooming, foaming underground.
Darkness can't burn out, it makes
an unseen glow, like a coal waiting
to be lit. Buried life, I've
gone under. How did I think that light
was everything when here it only
outlines the intelligence
of the dark: discs fallen across
boulders like slices of moon,
memory walls and spinning columns.
I went into the opal dark, I held
my wild shadow for comfort.
I could have kept going but I was afraid
to burn out where my eyes
would be useless. Though some things
live in no-light, I cannot.
I could have stayed, wandering
through the holes in the world,
but there were voices, sounds
of dripping, and one way back climbing
slippery thresholds, trying to imagine again
the open sky, my old life just
a dream, one way back climbing
toward a hole where the rock
was crusted over, curtained with ferns,
and the lit world came seeping in.

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Copyright © 2015 Anne Marie Macari All rights reserved
from Red Deer
Persea Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission