Portrait of Atlantis as a Broken Home

              I swim down to 

              look for our four-

              chambered house.

                            The window

              in our room still leaf-

              darkened, its bruiselight

              charged with fault. 

Am I very lonely? 

             I age in reverse until I am as

             small as my child

             body, my chest swollen

             with bright longing

             that the walls will not always

             greet each other 

                           in collapse—

The lord is kind.

             The underworld is lit by half

                          -moon as if to say, none

                          of this is evidence,

                          only decay.

             In the drift, this wreck still looks like a life:

             everything still hanging is relieved

             of its weight like an archer’s arrow

                           suspended in rags 

                           of snow.

             I hunt the me

             that made this heavenless night,

             my young fear circling your

             false beacon, its low

             stars and difficult earth stacked

             immense against

             every fact—

I should be funnier here:

                            Underwater, iron sinks

                                                                            weightless as       

               a kite 

                                     plummeting 

                      through peaks.

Credit

Copyright © 2019 by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 25, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“I wrote the first version of this poem while living in Colorado in early 2013. Newly married and homesick during an unusually dark and snowy winter, the poems I wrote during this period were affective mappings of the terrain beneath memory, its deeper ruins stored in the body. Like Lorca's idea of the cante jondo, or deep song, "where the ruins of history, the lyrical fragment eaten by the sand, appear live like the first morning of its life," this poem is denied a clear narrative and has to dive into the wreck to unearth a more visceral logic from its lyric fragments. Oddly, this poem, among others I wrote during this period, have startled me in their prescience when I come back to revise them—what the body already knows, how a poem's intelligence guides us, early as it can, toward the first morning of a new life.”

—Vanessa Angelica Villarreal