Katherine Soniat

The Petri Dish Landings 

This dream won’t talk but the door opens to a kitchen
where I am classified. The witness.
And here they are:
man, woman, and their young charge swirled in layers
of each other—patterns of the familial creatures
that redden and swim in a darkroom.

But wait, this is the man whose eyes came alive at our
beginning. Tonight’s experiment moves his hand for mine
as three petri dishes land on formica, and the friction
between us collapse—
dishes labeled, “no touching with
fingers. Onion and lemon mixed in combustible parts.”

How come no us; why this mythic joke on proximity?
The way we aren’t who we are.

Fitting fabric for another world—the sweethearts disarmed
at the cave exit,
Eurydice blended with shadows.

***

Here Not

I was promised directness, no illusions until that plan rolled over,
burying its head in the sand. Still the grit’s flying as our train derails,
maybe loses its wheels, and we face each other on the ground: sudden
and fresh and whole, or at least headed that way. Take a breath, my love,
before you mix with me in the darkness. Already I’m there, calling myself
spotted spirit of the estranged (distilled-extinction-of-leopard), and you,
beating red of the moon (definitively weathered).

We lapse into our sleepy animal hearts to shut winter out. Records of night and
day disappear. I open my eyes—that certain we’re infused with the wandering
wind. Then it arrives—tardy, stern, and sniffing first my hand then yours for
direction, for a linearity that would undo even the coils of DNA. It wants
to stand for us. It stands above our almost wordless space, your heart
moving with mine. You say, I want this. And knowing I am that,
facets of sunlight crawl the bedroom floor, silent and elusive.

***
***