Sinkholes

This is a dark, new poem. A few days ago I heard Prof. Jean Walton present a memoir chapter about revisiting her childhood home in Vancouver, B.C. She used topgraphic and geological maps to show the estuary of the rivers around Vancouver as the background for her description of visiting a place where it rained incessantly and where the people were prepared to be driven from their homes at any moment by a flood. I was struck by one of these maps, which showed vast underground waterflows under the land, larger than the rivers above. This reminded me that I had been studying US Geological Survey maps of my native Southwestern Pennsylvania, and I had been struck by how mountainous the terrain was and how everything was covered with old coal mines and iron mines. I had read stories about sink holes opening into old mines or into flooded limestone caverns, and then I remembered two places: "The Swamp," in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, where I attended college for a few years, and a sink hole in Scottdale, Pennsylvania where I spent my childhood. This poem is an improvisation, bringing together these images. 

i

They called it The Swamp,

and although much of the lakeshore

was wetland, weed- and frog-

infested, lily-pad-mosquito-land,

everyone knew, when you said it

with that certain intonation

voicing italics and initial caps,

that you meant The Swamp.

It was a pond, reed-fringed

water a shallow cover for floor

of mud from which noxious vapors

bubbled, and where foxfires glowed

on certain moonless nights.

Beneath the mud, though none could see it

was a water-filled cavern

of unknown depth. I was shown

the Geological Survey map whose legend

denominated a place with no known bottom.

Locals take that on faith:

for generations it’s been the place

where useless vehicles, scrap iron

and dead refrigerators are dragged,

pushed with some danger to the townsmen

as they go knee-deep in sucking mud

until their offering is far enough in

for whatever it is that wants things

to begin its inexorable pulling.

Within a day an old jalopy

is nothing but two round headlights,

glass frog-eyes, then nothing

as by the next morning the swamp pool

resumes its perfect flatness, its mud

as uniformly flat as a well-made bed.

ii

I remember a field

we were not allowed to play in —

and playing there anyway

my friends and I discovered

the vertical maw into blackness

we learned was an abandoned mine.

One day it had been a cornfield;

the next the shaft had fallen in.

In a town criss-crossed with forgotten

mines, it could happen anywhere:

holes the size of pancakes, holes

just big enough to swallow a bully,

an arrogant preacher, a rival

(if only one could make them appear!)

Soft ground was best, but even

a sidewalk crack, a storm drain opening,

a gymnasium floor or a toilet

could give way into a sinkhole,

a cenote, a sudden burst

of Karst topography. Someone you really

didn’t like could be swept away

into an underground river or fall,

fall, fall beyond the length of rope

to a dull thud at the hard place

between the earth’s crust and mantle.

We came back again and again to see it,

to measure how black

its blackness could be.

Tar, coal, obsidian, ink: nothing we knew

was blacker than this cavern-hole.

We threw soft coal, and chunks

of road gravel, iron slag

and a 16-ounce soda bottle

as hard as we could from a safe overhang.

No echo answered our probing.

So far as we knew, it had no bottom,

as though the mine below

had been mined from below

by subterranean demons.

Although we stopped playing there

and walked a long way 'round

the hillock that humped over it,

in dreams we walked its maw-edge,

lost our bearing, missed one another’s

outreached hand of rescue,

or were pushed —

and worse by far than the nightmare

of falling into it was the dread

of what might come out of it,

if it wanted to, and was hungry enough.

What if, at night, some shambling Thing

crept into our cellars, filling great sacks

from our coal bins, returning the fuel

to the mountain depths? What if we went,

as we sometimes did, to stoke the furnace

at the stroke of midnight

and came eye to eye with It?

iii

I read of places

where sink holes appear

without warning, some watered

beneath with underground rivers,

but others just chasms, cave vents

or rifts between two angry seams

of geologic tension. Cybele’s

temple was just such a place,

its altar an opening into darkness

that drove women mad, and men

to self-mutilation.

Just such a place

is the entrance to Tartarus,

nine days below Hell.

One falls, not into open space

like Milton’s bad angels

(who enjoyed a feast of starlight

while they plummeted) —

but no, one falls

     into an ever-narrowing funnel

     of cold darkness,

into a place where legs

    and arms are useless

until there is nothing of you

     but a head screaming upwards

towards an ever-dwindling

     pinpoint of light.

Our earth is a shifting island of sea and magma,

Swiss-cheesed with sink holes, cenotes,

Blue Holes at the bottoms of coral seabeds —

Something riddled with Nothing,

orbiting a self- regulated explosion,

sun hurtling around and away from

the Black Hole at the rift of space-time,

Every moment of existence here averts

an infinity of empty, unpeopled stars.