for Rachel, who took me there
I was less taken with the cave lake being bottomless
than with the stalactites becoming
stalagmites in its mirror and all of us bent
over the rail, staring at our death masks.
Maybe I’d descended into one cave too many.
It’s not that I don’t tremble or have had enough
of the holy, but splendor and reverence
have come to quicken my pulse with shame.
Then there was the slit traveling the cavernous roof
for miles, hedged with ‘straw’ stalactites
that grow one inch per hundred years,
their sesquicentennial presence “proof” we were safe.
She won’t jilt us, joked the guide.
Young and beautiful Rachel, like you I was seething
at how prisoners forced to build the cement platform
on which we stood were mentioned as a fun fact.
Were the thirty still on death row among them,
have those freed brought their kids to the Cave
to see the platform and from it heard, as we did,
how rainbow trout were released into this lake,
home to blind fish, how the latter were killed
not knowing by whom or why, how it did not
work out well for the new occupants either?
Without flow, trapped in stasis, their eggs rotted.
—
Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collections Cemetery Ink (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010). She is graduate program director and professor of English at Monmouth University (New Jersey) and former poetry & translation faculty in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Drew University (New Jersey).
