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  • Rowing, and: As If Ovid Had Written Their Story, and: Flying West, and: Shadow Play
  • Allison Funk (bio)

Rowing

Each time he twists to look over his shoulder, the boat follows, veering off course.

When rowing it’s best to face where you’ve been, not where you’re going,

I venture, knowing, as elsewhere, my son fears he’ll be overtaken as soon as his back is turned.

Slaps on the water’s surface his only response, I say nothing more for now,

anxious to avoid the usual exchanges that capsize us both. But in this sturdy aluminum rowboat

on our first family outing in years, the sky brightening, the island we’re headed for coming into sight,

we’re suddenly finding the right words as if they’d been waiting— a lake full, all we have to do is cast.

He’s even talking to my husband, my husband to him, and in minutes everything joins in the conversation— [End Page 194]

the bailer clanging like a cowbell, twin oarlocks answering the crickets on shore—an improbable chorus

cheering him on as my son rows us across the lake, lifting the oars and lowering them

with such ease they seem to catch the mercurial water, and, as lightly, release it.

As If Ovid Had Written Their Story

There was a before, though he could not have known the girl she was once:

adrift, nearly weightless— pollen, or a sixteenth note gone as soon as it sounds.

She says, Darling, and he hears her growl. She comes closer,

and he takes his aim, seeing talons and fangs. And who is he, if not a changeling?

Where’s his damp crown the dusk of wild mushrooms unearthed from the loam? [End Page 195]

Grown, the smallest rustling disturbs him, turns her, nearly everyone, into a predator.

In the wind starting up now she’d like to run from her son, but in the dim woods

she can’t see beyond, she is held by what’s held against her.

Flying West

Crossing a continent she looks out at the night behind, light ahead

from under a door it seems. The woman is reminded of the levees

back home, the floodwaters rising, how the vestige of day

will go under. For now, though, she returns to the novel she’s reading

in which a body is floating downstream— feast of crows and fish,

it hardly looks human. She starts to make up a backstory [End Page 196]

for the drowned—the man had a troubled son, she imagines,

then, recognizing her own plot in the one she’s inventing,

stops. Oh, to be borne, borne away, she almost says

out loud, knowing she can put the bloated face

of the moon to the east behind her only while aloft.

Still, she thinks, neither there nor elsewhere yet,

she’s free as one crossing a tightrope can be.

Shadow Play

The world. Our sun. And the moon. Not a family exactly, though some call the first

Mother Earth. And the three can be seen to be familial in the way they circle [End Page 197]

one another—the moon leashed to its mother, mother lassoed herself—

the tethers invisible but felt on nights like this when our brimming satellite,

sun, world are all in alignment. A moment, we might say, of accord,

or a model instead of how some of us come to shadow each other.

Like when my wooden ball landed between my son’s and a wicket. Die! he cried at ten,

mallet swinging to knock my globe sky high. Out of the game, yard, block, beyond

the reach of glistening grass, straight out of the universe. Child’s play,

as onto a cotton screen, the shadows of puppets are cast. The figure that grows

and grows until its adversary is overwhelmed, much as the umbral dusk [End Page 198]

of the earth seeps, then floods over the moon, the moon over our house,

a curtain drawn, then opening again on another act. [End Page 199]

Allison Funk

Allison Funk has published three books of poems: The Knot Garden (Sheep Meadow P), Living at the Epicenter (Northeastern UP), and Forms...

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