Kathryn Sonntag
Safe, Sound
It is a subterraneous melody,
The scent of skin after roaming
Foothills of late summer,
His voice invoking myself as a child
Feigning sleep after bedtime tales.
The lyric I ask him for, now at 29,
Bathes my eyelids through the phone.
Tonight, the remedy is Max stories,
Told as I lie in bed
Squeezing stones
For some kind of rescue.
So he arrives.
Max, the black cocker spaniel
I still believe talks.
He chases a mountain lion into the gully,
Into the thin place, which
My young father (now my old father’s voice)
Inhabits. Here--
The distance between heaven
And earth collapses
And we are unmasked.
I hear his voice as from another room
In a cottage at the center of the world,
A cottage never before divined.
For the first time I move out
Out from under its name, and see
The sputtering fire, the eternal return.
Kathryn Sonntag graduated from the University of Utah with a BS in environmental studies and a BA in English. She has published various poems in its undergraduate literary magazine Shades and in the Wilderness Interface Zone. She recently finished a master's degree in landscape architecture from Utah State University.
Safe, Sound
It is a subterraneous melody,
The scent of skin after roaming
Foothills of late summer,
His voice invoking myself as a child
Feigning sleep after bedtime tales.
The lyric I ask him for, now at 29,
Bathes my eyelids through the phone.
Tonight, the remedy is Max stories,
Told as I lie in bed
Squeezing stones
For some kind of rescue.
So he arrives.
Max, the black cocker spaniel
I still believe talks.
He chases a mountain lion into the gully,
Into the thin place, which
My young father (now my old father’s voice)
Inhabits. Here--
The distance between heaven
And earth collapses
And we are unmasked.
I hear his voice as from another room
In a cottage at the center of the world,
A cottage never before divined.
For the first time I move out
Out from under its name, and see
The sputtering fire, the eternal return.
Kathryn Sonntag graduated from the University of Utah with a BS in environmental studies and a BA in English. She has published various poems in its undergraduate literary magazine Shades and in the Wilderness Interface Zone. She recently finished a master's degree in landscape architecture from Utah State University.