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'The Dark Zone'
Kathryn Lomer
Sassafras Creek burbles along its course,
scrapping with sticks and stones,
eddying about the ankles of children.
We set up camp on its bank,
breaking five tent pegs in the pitch;
summer earth won’t forgive.
My son plucks up his courage
and joins some boys’ ball game,
aware of the shape our family isn’t.
Then you arrive in your hatchback
and unfold like a circus,
squeezing into the last site
right beside us: three children,
tent, stove, camping table-and-chairs.
You set up your big top in the dark;
voices and laughter close by are a comfort.
Sassafras Creek keeps me awake all night,
till my skull is a cave,
made by running, dripping water.
Are we having fun yet? I ask my son.
He says, Got to have vitamin F.
Rugged up for the constant below-ground temperature,
our families meet outside Marakoopa Cave.
Soon, your tears tell the story of a loved husband
some years dead, how every anniversary
you place a wreath at those traffic lights,
and wonder if the truck driver
also remembers, also returns.
You say, It makes me sad to go camping.
But I promised myself I’d take the children.
We have entered karst country,
hollowed beneath us
like the skulls of seals,
all sinus crevice and scrape;
it is a honeycomb of cavities.
If we walk out into the bush
our feet will stumble in saucer-shaped dolines,
sweet-sounding depressions of collapsed limestone.
Sinkholes disguise themselves as lakes.
The ground we tread is far from solid.
Speleothems: formations of calcite,
but the word sounds like champagne flutes.
Beside stalactites and stalagmites,
helicites grow sideways, twisting;
there are shawls and flowstones:
it is impossible to know
how anything will turn out.
We practise old mnemonics about ceiling
and ground, hear new ones
to do with tights falling down.
My son wants to take the lead from our guide,
and enter each cavern first.
Only when she turns off lights
and we experience pure darkness
does he change his mind.
We can’t see a hand in front of our face;
it’s like not existing.
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Glow worms glow, as they do, in their dark.
We learn about cave spiders
below the spark of their stomachs,
how creatures adapt to a lack of light.
It is not necessary to have eyes at all
if everything is dark, so the eyes have gone.
If there was light, I would glance across at you.
I ask if the caverns have romantic names
like those I remember from Japan –
ceiling of an umbrella shop,
den of the dragon’s teeth –
but, no, post-modern has gone underground;
science prevails.
There were such names,
but everyone’s forgotten.
A single drop of water falls as we watch,
scattering minute particles of calcite.
Time is visible – this moment
the beginning of aeons.
Thoreau said a lake is the eye of the earth;
this cave is the ear
with its long canal and cavities,
its coiling intricacy.
It has heard another tale of grief,
carried it away into the dark zone.
Emergence into light is hard
now we know the marvel of this hidden realm.
My friend has held a key to the cave for months,
like a sorceress; she knows
this entering, this leaving.
It’s rebirth, she tells me,
from the womb of earth.
The thing is, that’s how it feels.
If super-colliders are the new cathedrals,
I’d rather worship in these catacombs,
sacrificing anything I can think of,
with the certain knowledge that Earth
has formed us, and made us who we are;
it is earth we’ll become.
The next time we meet – in a theatre –
it is also dark. You are playing cello.
When the lights come up
you smile straight at me. |
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