I was forbidden to ride my bike—
not enough skin left on my knees
to stitch them up from sliding
over tar chip gravel at the dead end.
So we walked the tracks of the Northern Central Railway
through a dense wooded corridor
balancing on parallel rails and harmonizing.
Out of sight our secrets were safe:
shared smokes, rum cokes
and dazzling escape plans.
to see where we would end up,
a counterpoint to the straight edges
we were schooled to follow
tending as we were toward feral.
a narrow stream valley
oddly wild so close to a familiar road,
we stopped by an abandoned construction site.
Its shameless dishevelment
cut a different kind of edge.
Debris floated off course
in the cellar hole deep with water
from an underground spring,
a scar in the midst of wild.
Our nervous laughter, taunts,
dares echoed against the slopes.
I stepped up to the edge, sat,
and let my feet dangle down.
at least no one ever told.
but I remember looking up at their faces
ringing the hole above as I kicked to the surface,
grabbed for a plank to keep from sinking back.
I worried that I had ruined
the back seat of her car
with my muddy drowning clothes.
I was not grounded and continued
to roam with the pack.
We clustered under streetlights,
the forest nearby pulsing
the vibration of millions:
cicadas, tree frogs, crickets,
in full-throat end of season roar.
After twilight thickened to dark, I’d hear
my father’s voice rise over the din,
.
a scattering of neighbors, silhouettes
the slow slip of Earth’s shadow over the moon.
and curl into the predawn chill. One mother
spreads a blanket, pours cocoa for her boys.
a burnt umber disc emerges
from its chemical slurry.
Mountains, craters, the familiar
pock marked face, appear veiled and softened,
by Earth’s deep sepia overcast.
No opinions, no polls, no posturing.
the obliteration of night in a line of fire
then pulling up the overlay of day.
the moon has disappeared
absorbed by blue.
to grab a meal, cast a vote, do our work,
.
sailing the southwest coast
of Australia as near to your Augusta
as I am to mine in Maine?
Are you the flip side of me?
Likely not, just a curiosity
of imagination, linking
us across the globe’s diameter
as far apart as earth allows,
your sunset, my dawn,
we reach through earth’s
anatomy: crust, mantle, core,
marking time by the same
phases of the moon,
lifted up and let down by tides
held in place by gravity
in my winter, your summer;
you are not my doppelganger,
unlikely my soul mate
as you sail along cutting a fine wake,
your Antipodean songs
mingling note for note with
minke whales whose voices
circle the globe: minke to
minke to minke to minke.
Antipodean Fellow Terrestrial,
I learned playing in the woodlot,
the challenge of our connection,
the magnitude of digging
a straight line to reach you;
I have learned and I believe
your whale song is my whale song
your sun and moon are my sun and moon
your salt water and rain water are mine.
Picture this Antipodean Earthling,
the planet shot through
with unbreakable lines,
one for each pair of us, a call
and response neuron network.
Antipodean Partner, our mission,
.
© Judith Grey
Judith Grey lives on the Maine Coast where friendships and community as well as connections to the natural world inspire her writing. She writes to consider the puzzle of the world; how flora, fauna, geology, atmosphere, ideas, emotions, and relationships coalesce to form the setting that cradles her every day. Her poems have been published in The Lyric, The Baltimore Review, The Ocean State Review, About Place Journal, Mezzo Cammin and are forthcoming in Calyx.
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