There is mystery in this week’s poem of lostness and ice: I don’t know the full story behind where and how the poem’s speaker finds himself having fallen asleep in a pew – and I don’t need to. Myronn Hardy vividly conjures a moment and a mood, a sense of the untethered and the transitory that I can immerse in, understand and relate to without knowing the backstory. I love this poem’s specificity, how its lines keep us in midair between stanzas, and that it leaves us with the ephemeral solidity of ice.
Myronn Hardy is the author of several books of poetry, most recently “Radioactive Starlings,” published by Princeton University Press. His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, the Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. He teaches at Bates College.
Impossibility
By Myronn Hardy
You didn’t expect to fall asleep
but you did briefly in the pew.
Briefly in the dim quiet
before the brief ballad of priests.
No myrrh that day
but always marble gold reminders
of what survives within the earth.
A woman from Angola walks near you
with a squirt bottle.
Her gaze determines you were dragged inside.
Seraphs did it because you wanted
to recall Catholic school
because you were lost.
Because someone you don’t know
will bring you a sack of grapes a
bottle of water.
Because you don’t know if your
love is near or wants to see you.
You will leave in a month.
You attempt to hold that slippery thing
but understand you will fail.
Impossible snow impossible
sea frozen over in shards.
Someone will meet you wearing
shards that will melt.
She will tell you the story of ice.
Megan Grumbling is a poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Impossibility” copyright © 2019 by Myronn Hardy. It appears by permission of the author.
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