Obsidian
Even the dark is endangered now, but it once ran wild
in my own backyard. It arrowed up from soil,
lifting shadows of grass blades into scales and fur
and teeth. Then larger things, the drape of willow trees
into feathered wings, a crouching body from hills
that hid the sun. Shapeshifter with a spine of ridgeline,
crest of cypress, antlers of weathervane and chimney.
Pantherine, cetacean, its heft like sand
against the house, pressing hard the panes.
When it brushed against my bedroom
window, it made a sound like glass
on glass.
\\
Hunted by light trespass and clutter, cornered
at the deadend of alleys—maybe you’ve been
taught the dark is dangerous
to approach, but as a girl I used to
feed it shadows from my palm.
It came to me without a face,
the way I imagined my future
lovers coming to my window, leaving me
widowed. The dark, an obsidian steed I could ride
all the way to wave-knapped cliffs
where love gives way
to grief.
//
There is pleasure now in naming
the things that will outlast us. See
how under, between, below, the dark
bides its time? It will claim the shapes
of our glass abandonments
as soon as the lights
go out inside.
\\
Would you believe me if I told you
I sometimes rode the dark alone, my shadow
fused to its molten cold? Didn’t you, my future,
join me once? Link your arms around my waist
and hold on tight? Obsidian delivered us
to a beach of black glass, black water
shattering against ebony cliffs. And then
a stillness fell like sand hushing through an hour
glass. Seals surfaced starglazed silence, ripples
knapped of starklight. Didn’t we slip
out of our skins and into silken algae
as if into dark’s own pelt? My future
children floated somewhere in the vast
plane of past and potential, within me
or without. If I imagined them at all,
I imagined them small
against a night like this.
Erin Rodoni is the author of And If the Woods Carry You (SIR Press, 2021), Body, in Good Light (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2017), and A Landscape for Loss (NFSPS Press, 2017). She won the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and her poems have appeared in journals such as Blackbird, Poetry Northwest, and Fairy Tale Review. She teaches and mentors through the Writing Salon.
Header photo by Kavic.C, courtesy Shutterstock.
