There is mystery in this week’s poem of lostness and ice: I don’t know the full story behind where and how the poem’s speaker finds himself having fallen asleep in a pew – and I don’t need to. Myronn Hardy vividly conjures a moment and a mood, a sense of the untethered and the transitory that I can immerse in, understand and relate to without knowing the backstory. I love this poem’s specificity, how its lines keep us in midair between stanzas, and that it leaves us with the ephemeral solidity of ice.

Myronn Hardy is the author of several books of poetry, most recently “Radioactive Starlings,” published by Princeton University Press. His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, the Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. He teaches at Bates College.

Impossibility

By Myronn Hardy

You didn’t expect to fall asleep

but you did briefly in the pew.

Briefly in the dim quiet

before the brief ballad of priests.

No myrrh that day

but always marble     gold    reminders

of what survives within the earth.

A woman from Angola walks near you

with a squirt bottle.

Her gaze determines you were dragged inside.

Seraphs did it because you wanted

to recall Catholic school

because you were lost.

Because someone you don’t know

will bring you a sack of grapes     a

bottle of water.

Because you don’t know if your

love is near or wants to see you.

You will leave in a month.

You attempt to hold that slippery thing

but understand you will fail.

Impossible snow     impossible

sea frozen over in shards.

Someone will meet you wearing

shards that will melt.

She will tell you the story of ice.

Megan Grumbling is a poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Impossibility” copyright © 2019 by Myronn Hardy. It appears by permission of the author.