Mechanics of a Drowning
Madeleine Dale
How is it between you now? Sweet Ophelia, madness
washed clean in a swell of ground water
welling in the arch of your back.
You must lay down in the hemlock glen before
you can be planted with rosemary. You
will not remember this:
what it took
to rinse out your hands, your hair clotted with rue.
Let your boy lie down in his grave;
he has been there before:
he will climb out. You
have not yet washed up on the bankside.
There is an osculatory relationship
between water and whetstone, between roots and
tender petals.
We touch
briefly, and arc away. You curl like the end of filigree
like a fern in the bud, for now
unseen and unseeing.
24
Cauldron Anthology