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
Reservoir Summer
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.