Secret Rivers

"What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice"

-Edmund Spenser


1. Buried Continents

These days I only read news
from distant places - the Amazon,
the Himalayas, the great
Sahara - yet all the reports
mention you.

I tried to leave you
behind. I moved across
the mountains, into a room
of my own, to keep my silence
close to me.

Yet every night I sing old tropes
of you, cool and smooth as glaciers --
here I am every morning prowling
through tangled dreams,
stifled by humidity.

Have you grown
wild, traveling everywhere?

As of late, you are encasing yourself
far from me, under Antarctica. I want
to slide in to your core, to test you
the way scientists sample cylinders
of ice from the lakes they've found
beneath the continent.

Should I leave you be or reach out
some tendril to stir your memory,
so our voices
might mingle again?

2. Divergence

The ice at the south
pole is so dense no air delves
down, so the lakes lie
buried under miles

and eras of ice
without a breath
of contemporary air - untouched

by the molecules Lucy breathed,
or Da Vinci, or the atoms flung
from the annihilation
of Hiroshima; not even my hot

breath could penetrate those volumes,
any more than your fingertips will graze
mine again as you open your mouth
wide as the rainforest

sounding a blue
flash of macaws

that wing out my windows --
you will never again make my bed
tropical. Scientists imagine new life

forms emerging out of the solitude,
held in the privacy of the lakes --
how organisms flourished, evolved strange
and stranger, just as my thoughts twist
to musings and breed misunderstandings

since we've grown apart.

3. Revelations

Now that the sky is tall with summer
and oranges hang on boughs outside
my door, heavy as memory,

ice cubes crack and splinter
in my hot palms,

and scientists have scanned Antarctica
with echoes, revealing layered sheets of ice
and currents, linking the lakes;
journalists etch the headline

"Secret rivers"

inscribing how water flows
out of stagnant basins, how molecules
mingle in channels no one ever
laid eyes on --

Can a primeval river who never
heard the voice of a woman
ever keep a secret? Roaring
or still, Antarctic rivers
were never concealed by intention,
only hidden by ice
and circumstance: water has no desire,

cannot press its thighs together or wince,
hearing its name.

Day by day I am uncovering
Pandora's basins of Lethe,

forgetting the small nuances
of your gestures, the pressure
of your fingers on my neck,

though at odd times a scent on the wind
reports your body
melding, transitioning into
distant landscapes--

how we both adapt instead of combining
our fates into one breath,
and I imagine that our silence too
may be an intimacy.

4. Illustrations

I count secrets I've known, the usual
portraits of you: a city park bench, steam
on a car window,

a veil of blankets, a hesitation
over broken shells --

Secrecy is an ownership, and I claim
these memories; it is a name
for what should remain
hidden, as each day I spell you
aloud in a forbidden ritual;

secrecy is a boundary
for language -
how your eyes fled
the jungles we grew, pulling
branches between us,

how I'm chasing the flash of your skin,
cream-colored like the bark of trees
only tribal shamans name,

and sometimes while I'm rowing
canoes of my thoughts southward,
the whys fill up my mouth, pulpy

and tangy like slices of orange,
until my tongue touches the bitter
seed, remembering: "This is just
what I'm doing now," you said.

The next month you were in his bed.
I don't want to think of you
two exchanging hot
breath while I suck
on silence,

of how he might have pressed you
against a wall and what words
you traded after, as I
eat my questions.

I wonder whether
the slow streams of sweat that
slide down your neck, each tasting
as if it seeps from the rainforest's
crown

are better known now than Antarctica's
secret rivers –

whether glacial lakes are more obscure
than the new species
of birds I discovered when you
fluttered your lashes.


5. Listening

If I could only look through
mountains and forests, peering
south into your windows

and measure whether it was my
body, my silence or your new
lovers who changed the way you
spoke to me –

yet I can't see through the shimmering
mosquitoes nor hear myself
through the buzzing spring.

Even sniffing the loam where we waltzed,
I keep these thoughts
close, so no one else tastes
this our silence.

We are secrets from each other now.

I will only read the rising
and falling stock rates
and stack trays of cubed ice
in my freezer, hearing

the heron as she settles white
wings on a pond nestled
in the heart of Silicon Valley.