MEG YARDLEY

The Ice Moon’s Distant Past

 Saltwater ocean underground:

My father recalls his long-ago year of terrible mourning,
losing his first wife, then his father and mother,
over the span of ten months.

Thick ice shell of surface, five hundred miles deep:

Decades later (as he tells me
about his hair going white
overnight), the refrain of his grief
sounds faint, a long thread of drowning
spindling up from under.

Tensional faults in the grooved terrain, fissures where plates broke apart:

The creases in his forehead
deepen when he’s trying to understand.

Phantom craters, wide and flat, engraved over older fractures, palimpsests:

My mother’s love arrived
to etch new figures across the deep tracings
without erasing: the ease of it,

her laughter and her certainty,
children and grandchildren of the following
forty-five years and counting.

The hidden ocean is believed to hold more water than all of Earth’s surface:

There are currents he’ll always carry. 

Meg Yardley lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry and short fiction have recently appeared or are forthcoming in publications including Gulf Coast, Salamander, SWWIM, Cagibi, and the Women’s Review of Books.