Dream Rescues: After Pulling Her to Shore

Dream Rescues: After Pulling Her to Shore

Now all Junes are open water blue winter lakes.

A complicated grate of ice.   

The time when, in February, remember? you

had to take off your gloves to fuss

the auger after you tripped and it slipped  

into the just ladled hole?  I’d slushed it to a bucket-

fort any summer kid would crave to make,

and you'd lurched somehow, just dropped

and your hand and the drill fell in, fell

down that slushed-out closing slow hole.  You,

your great open sweep of coat fanning the ice,

were a broken-legged doe, and you went flat

to your chest and wet, wet.  My castle collapsed.

And after, with your elbows

and feet a flinging parapet and drawbridge.

You were up to your shoulder and you pitched,

you bit down on your lip and pulled.  Remember? 

But by then one, then two, ruby spatters

smacked the snow.  When the cold caught, 

struck you dull, you could not remember how to pull

horizontal, so, barehanded, I slipped in

beside you like a midwife might

to glide beside the breach and slide to

find that one grounded bone, and ease it

straight and guide you into the colder but dryer

wind.  And finally, our augur, free and freezing,

immune as Dad’s blue January anvil. (Oh Aaron!  I go

under that water to recover her every night.

Every night sleep is tight as ice, a closing

hole, and pulling is breaking you (her) loose.  Her hair

is your coat-tail-fan on the ice.  That splayed-leg-

stiff.  That slap at the first shock of water, rigid

lips and the same black crack down the middle

of your lip.  My only fault is I can't get back

to shore. Even if I make my breath water. I puff, I needed  

to, your name, easy, you are so close to me, on her cheek.)

Remember?  In the dream
she dies because I don't know her name.  

Holding you on the ice, once your fled blood starts back
to your wrist, persuaded to stay, 

it’s as easy as breathing, a tingle, like soda bubbles.  We  
laugh at the end.  And this part is dream true:

My own open coat.  My shirt lifted.  My own warm skin,
pimpled past shivering, soon that anvil cold blue.   When I put your wet

hands under my arms, and I close over them, and then down, 
your near dead fingers spark.  The water changes: 

The shiver.  The pimple. The teeth over the lips.

And for a moment those fingers and my ribs are the same skin
and bones.  For a minute we are warm.  Remember?

Even though we thought we were only sheath, 
only bone, we were, like a broken doe 

or a drowning girl, heaving in snow.  Slipping.  Getting 
up.  Coughing and pissing before we skid, 

at first, and then, like nothing, come free.  Solid as a auger.  
As a girl that girl come up from bottom, her matted scalp 

in my fist, limp and frigid.  But with grit: your fingers 
beneath my arms, the future use of them whispered, handed back to you, 

simple as a life coming out of the wet dark, grabbing blood
and breath, gulping it all down whole.