At the Ouray Vapor Caves Poem by Pamela Uschuk

I

Persephone, too, shudders at disrobing
when aspen leaves freeze, just before opening
the slimey door to the underworld.
Clammy as a wet towel, the air exhales
fatal black mold and sulfur
across the ceiling of the spa shower
despite aromatic eucalyptus and cedar
smoldering in sconces near the message.

Your skin registers first the ecstatic scrim
that laces her fear, jittery as a salamander,
as she begins to read earth's scald
with her fingertips, descending
through granite the color of a scalp wound
striped with aging hair, descending
through milky quartz,
through the stone heart of a mountain
rising a mile, then more above her.

The antechamber is dim, so steamy
that eyes film and fingertips lose their grip.
This is the realm of water gods
cascading across smooth mineral buttocks,
hollowing the mountain into their own drum
keeping time to a constant drip. She readies.

This is nothing compared to the crush
of dark heat that pushes against
the door of her terror she cracks
in spite of this abduction
from her mother, who is left
to her fury, to scream then
turn earth blind as ice.

II

My love and I enter the far grotto
together, slick as vulva
or oiled nipples, heat-woozed, the only
couple inside this giant geode
radiating haze above a broiling pool
droozed black as stamens inside a poppy.
We dip in our hands, our feet,
watch them become their own ghosts.

Stalagmites rise around us sluggish
as glaciers, the steady
pop of droplets from
stalactites like wet stone beards
we stroke with numb fingers

while we breathe our own stacatto
heart beats, regretting those bursts
of desire too often lost to laundry, stacks
of unpaid bills multiplying on the counter,

lost to the stale air of offices and memos
collapsing our lungs.

III

It is then we relearn speech, purring
words that reverberate deep
as the throat thrums of Tibetan monks
or the keening of sperm whales across
distances as vast as the spaces between stars
in Alpha Centuri, yearning as old
as the moan of Pluto when he finally lifts
Persephone's smooth chin to his eternal loneliness.

Dumb with sweat, we hum across
the cave to one another, long vowels
clanging against sorrow, like vows taken
long ago in the belly of earth, while
Persephone opens
wholly to what is inscribed
on dark bedrock oozing heat.