Poem of the Week, by Davis McCombs

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Poem of the Week, by Davis McCombs

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Freshwater Drum

- Davis McCombs

In certain parts of Kentucky’s cave country it is possible to drop a buoyant object in a sinkhole and then retrieve it, often hours later, when it floats up in a bluehole spring. A watermelon, for instance, after having traveled the length some underground stream, emerges chilled to a cool 54 degrees.

Once there was a boy; and once, the sun a tarnished silver plate

between the polebean vines, he led her under barbed wire

and down a ditch to a tar-black smear that gave back nothing

but their own hearts pumping. This is a song of gravel dust

and fescue, of balance won, and a metal culvert’s stagnant slubs.

This is a music of the heart’s solidity. He showed her how

to thump the rind, their faces shadowed on its lightning stripes.

He showed her how a shirt, untucked, can make a basket

for lugging a burden down a red clay wash. Sixty years, the sun

still askew above the hill, and now she carries only the song,

but the boy is inside it, and the melon, too, and when she follows

its sequence of familiar notes along that weedless rut

she finds two bicycles propped at the head of a path angling

down mud and hoof prints to a knob of water blossoming

and blossoming, she finds the white perch drumming its tendons

by the undercut silt bank, finds the stream’s clear discharge,

how it nudged the river’s muddle, and they waited, the cold interior

of that music she would not yet hum nor carry, coming numbly

among facets. She follows the song where it leads: past

the striped and oblate orb that wavered into focus there

below the ledge, over the black seeds in a half-moon on the sand,

and to the grave in which, come that winter, the boy would lie.