This past weekend I attended a high school reunion, an adventure in time and space. Some of the people I’d actually known since kindergarten. In addition to our joys, we tacitly acknowledged our own trips to the Underworld, the hidden places that inform our disparate lives. Bodies may change (including my own), but our heart connections remained intact. We really didn’t need to express this connection in words; a huge long embrace often said it all. This week’s poem is for all my classmates from long ago.
TUNNELING
I have found my way down.
Feverish, muddled, I dig
deep through loam and stone.
I jam my bleeding fingers
behind stuck rocks,
my nose dirty, the darkness close.
Burrowing deeper I feel
the earth breathing, her flesh
old pebbles, algae, rotted trunk.
Inside her I can breathe.
Rise and fall, rise and fall.
Even the hands of moles move with her.
Secret springs pulse to the beat
of blood and lung. I press
against the damp cool dark,
far from glare and sounds
of feet and talk.
My eyes grow larger now, burning
wide as miners’ lamps. From every
crack and cleft a tiny rivulet
of sand spills in my path.
It’s deeper
down from here on in: to find
that hidden root, a living course,
the buried seam that joins all things.
–Christine Hemp
Image: Jackson Pollock
Mural, 1943
95 5/8 x 237 3/4 in.
University of Iowa Museum of Art
