This week’s poem, David Sloan’s “Lake and Hollow,” celebrates a union of landscapes and lovers. I love how this poem limns its inlets and islands as both mythic archetypes and specific, beloved settings, which reveal themselves with tender beauty and slowness.
A graduate of the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Poetry Program, Sloan is the author of “The Irresistible In-Between” and “A Rising and Other Poems” (Deerbrook). He is a recipient of the Betsy Sholl Award, the inaugural Maine Poets Society Prize and two Maine Literary awards. After teaching for nearly 50 years, most recently at Maine Coast Waldorf High School in Freeport, he is now semi-retired, content to focus on the joys of being a grandparent, gardening, cycling and more regular writing.
Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are open through the end of the year. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers, LGBTQ+ writers and other underrepresented voices. You’ll find a link to submit in the credits below.
Lake and Hollow
By David Sloan
She grows up with a lake in her eyes,
he with a hungry hollow. She knows
the inlets and best blueberry islands,
memorizes the way the wind
traces its moods on the water,
wonders who waits on the far shore.
He plays in a meadow, wheels wind-lifted
around any makeshift diamond,
loves arriving home. He flits through dreams,
wonders who will inhabit the hollow.
How do they find one another?
Invisible hands must part the vapors,
printlessly, careful not to level paths
Or remove essential hindrances.
And when they finally meet, the veil
only gradually goes, like mist wraiths
over a moor, or the way autumn
takes time staining maples gold,
until the leaves only linger to give
each other light, until the wind
turns trees into crooked truths
with nothing left to hide.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Lake and Hollow,” copyright 2023 by David Sloan, appears by permission of the author.
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