Reservoir Summer

by Matt Dhillon

I am always drowning    and you are always coming to save me     and nowhere else is there even a ripple      the water so smooth it’s like glass     I believe you could walk on it     you could but not me      I would drown      The body they pulled from that slick mirror       was not mine       thank god     but some reflection  with ink for eyes and shadows for hair    someone I could have been  a brother      but not like you big brother      I have tried to reach into mirrors       and photos       wrinkle the plane    up to my wrists     elbows     shoulders     and fish out the part of me that’s like you     and goddamn Bass Pro shop          for plastic boats            and the belief that I could float on top of all of this      casting only a line below    and maybe pulling up     a thrashing muscle     almost liquid   a fluidity of scales     who knows what the lake has swallowed      into its immense silence   here is a gathering that starts with water     a gathered silence     a gathered stillness    I believe you are a reservoir    that can hold such things      but I could drown in a glass of water   pour me   in a cup   a pot   a vase     I’ll take any shape      pour me two legs   and I will walk    through the forest   through neighborhoods    sit at a coffeeshop   laugh like you   brother   for a while   but you can’t    pull me from this water      you can’t take    a thing from itself      pooling and rushing   it finds a way      back here     I may as well be a creek       the way I am always coming back here       and yes       gathering with myself    pooling    becoming a quantity   a volume   a vastness   and then there is nettle filling in the blanks    cattails standing on their spindles     asters open their wide eyes     sycamores spread on the shore     a heron glides along the bank       and the boy in me comes back      wades in to the hip   disappears


MATT DHILLON is still trying to grow up in Appalachia. He has been learning how to swim. His poetry has been published by Rattle, Streetlight Magazine, and The Poetry Society of Virginia.