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Instructions for Waking

Dappled Things

Jennifer Hartenburg

after reading Mary Oliver

You will not long remember
which part is dream and
which is waking parable.
Having filled your head 
with American poems—
virgilian guides—you’ve
waded into sleep’s black wood
a more primitive 
you crashing through

		the tangled 
ripe undergrowth. None
can say what thrushes wing there,
what honeyed berries 
swell wild in the bush, what
litanies, what rites.
As dawn returns, you 
return more nearly to your 
self, growing, perhaps,

more conscious of your children 
sleeping lightly now
nearby. Light laps like water 
along the shore where
you know what you must do, what
herculean feat.
Now at the frozen mountain
lake that is your life,
you take 

		a mammoth hammer
so large you cannot
wield it—and poise it even
so above your head.
Bearing down with force, you smash
the white glistening 
plane, opaque and lovely, but
not before the ice, 
hexagons expanding, cracks

the dam you did not 
know was there. The crystal slabs
of all that floating 
ice refracting light in each
direction will blind 
you. Dizzy you will fall down
and under water.
You may wonder then whether
and which way 

		to swim,
the press of searing 
water constricting you on
every side. Perhaps
you will fight the flow a while,
limbs frogging toward
the surface, a warmer more
familiar light, lungs
burning. It 

		doesn’t matter. 
You will not ever
breathe again—not like that. Pray
for gills. Fighting, or
no, you will come to the lip 
of the lake, crowning 
round out the breach in the dam.
You might slip-slide straight
through, or the water

		may squeeze 
for hours nudging 
inch by slow inch, but sooner
or later you will 
emerge from your tense matrix
to find yourself flung
wide and spilling down mountains 
in the roaring stream.
Bruised, you will come 

		to cliff fall
after cliff fall, swan 
diving ever down and down,
eternally drowned.
Looking about, you will see
gilled angels splitting
the water, leaping in spasms 
of wonder at 
		your side.

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Filed Under: Poetry, SS. Peter and Paul 2015

Mary, Queen of Angels 2020

Purchase Featuring nonfiction from Joshua Hren, fiction from Jennifer Marie Donahue and Rob Davidson and the winners and honorees of the Bakhita Prize in Visual Arts.

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