Hollis Robbins teaches literature, poetry, and aesthetics at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.
Her poetry has appeared recently in Per Contra, Boston Literary Magazine, Mastodon Dentist, and Bridges, a Jewish Feminist Journal. Her most recent scholarly article is a study of census politics in William Wordsworth’s “We are Seven” (1798), published in English Language Notes 48.2. She is the editor of the Penguin Classics edition of the poet Frances E.W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy (2010). She is at work on long project entitled Sonnets of Imprisonment.
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Pond
A spring had always been there underneath,
You said the night you handed me my drink
And then the rod you said you bought for me
The week before. We sat and fished a while.
Everything you said to me was wrong.
Every word you uttered was a lie.
I spent all my summers on a lake,
When I was growing up, the lively kind,
Noisy, pulsing warm with bugs and birds,
Weedy at the edge but blue beyond.
Sometimes I could see straight to the bottom—
Shoals of minnows, sunnies in abundance,
Swift and glinting bass and painted turtles,
Bent and warty pickerel, sticky frogs.
Your pond, the little pond that you’re so proud of,
Was dug by trucks and lined with plastic tarp.
You gestured as you told me how you chose
To make it just this width and just this depth.
You told me of the man who came each spring
And stocked the pond with bluegills, perch, and bass.
I held the rod you gave me and we sat there.
The brown and cloudy waters gave up nothing
Until the fish came right up to the surface;
You’d see their backs and claim to know their names.
You think you see the metaphor already;
But no, it isn’t what you think at all.
You always said we battled over truth—
But oh, the handmade isn’t always art.
How many men you pay to be around you!
One stacks your wood another mows your lawn.
I sat and held the rod and sipped my drink.
You said how much you liked that I was there.
The tarp, the rocks, the fish you stocked and fed
Were bought by you. You even bought your worms,
Though I showed you where to find them, by
The ferns, where they wriggled under mulch
You also bought. Corporate worms, I called them,
And you sulked and glared at me.
Butterflies are better under glass
With pins in them. Look at your collection!
That first weekend we went to the market.
We saw a handsome couple by their car;
One was white, the other black, their child,
Maybe fifteen months, was clearly mixed.
Isn’t that the best? you said with glee;
Doesn’t it make you happy? Well, I said,
Seeing a laughing couple is always nice,
And both of them appear to love their child,
After a morning outing still had smiles,
Made games of taking groceries from their cart.
Yes, but I meant the different races,
You said as if I didn’t understand.
Let us say I understood you well.
Let us say we understood ourselves.
The first time that you brought me to your house
The phone rang as we stepped inside the door—
A female caller wanted your opinion,
To tell her what you thought, if you had time
And you said sure.
Once I hoped to drive up to my lake.
We were on a trip to Cambridge but you said
“Let’s go to see the place I used to live.
It’s just around the corner over here.
Here’s the house where I was born and raised!
See the window just below the eaves?
That’s my bedroom, where I used to sleep
When I was just a boy.” You got aroused.
We went back to the room and that was that.
Monday in the dark you ran outside
Naked. You forgot the water pump
You turned on yesterday. You woke in panic.
I watched you from the window as you stumbled
Bug-eyed past the house, huffing red,
Your parts all floppy like a kangaroo
Bouncing as you loped toward the shed.
I called a taxi while you made us breakfast.
An old man came and I got in the car.
It backfired as we coasted past the dock
And the heron that would sometimes sleep below—
The great winged bird the color of the mist—
Lurched in frenzy out from where it hid,
Bumped its neck in springing from its nest,
Tilted once, corrected, sailed aloft
And disappeared across the neighbor’s field.
Mornings it is calm and cool with mist.
Afternoons the neighbor children swim.
Young fathers sit with toddlers in canoes,
Orange life vests poised like angels’ wings.
On a shadowed dock a woman reads.
Bats come out at twilight feeding time.
Fishermen with coolers in their boats
Lurk along the piney shore and smoke.
Blackened oak leaves carpet darkened beds
Of layered lily pads and purple flags.
The geese and loons and unnamed waterfowl
Splash and dive but muddy not the deep.