CANTO 4

The Soviet scientific drilling project selects its site,
the Kola Peninsula, and engineers begin to dig into
its plateau of ripe cloudberries. In seconds, the rig digs

silt to “below grave level,” Vova says, then “the depth
a Nile Crocodile can burrow.” They drill below a basin.
The aquifer drains. On a crest of land south-west from
there, Daria leans her cheek to a poppy on the wallpaper,
listens to foam-filled cavity. Io says, “they tunnel in time.”

They drill. Tearing the letter from its envelope, Nadya’s
eyes run down it to Love, Me, and she crumples the paper
into a fist. The Uralmash rig drills into the Baltic
Continental Crust and into Lithosphere. At a Solstice
party, guests are pleading with Peter to “play.” Aunt Dina
even gives him a golden coin. “Just one song.” Then
Peter plucks his harp on the terrace ’til father says “time
to sleep,” ’til Dina reaches into his blue breast pocket
for her coin and goes. They go, but Peter will play ’til
dawn. ’Til the ice swans stream to puddles on the lawn.

For twelve more years, the drill bores down until the rig
reaches twelve thousand meters. Ana will’ve measured so
many lengths of starched fabric in wingspans – left shoulder
to right fingertip – before she’s let go from the factory,
“her arms tremble now.”At that depth, there’s interference
in the boundary waves. Azakov, a seismologist, lowers
his microphone downand Finnish papers report it’s just
the tortures of hellfire yet again. Before they reach target
depth, drill-bits start to melt. Machines that walk the drag

line scream to a standstill. And then the Union dissolves.
And the site is soon forgotten. But the hole is still open–
in diameter, one foot then it’s forty thousand steps down.

Kneeling on the plateau in 2012, Valery welds the hole
shut. That night, he brings home a box of jam donuts.
And Lina turns from the dishes, where she been holding
her hands under fairy liquid for some warmth, to say,
“you’ll grow spherical if you keep at it.” He watches her
red nail poke once, twice into his gut, leaving bubbles.
Looks into her face. Like when the car swung round ’n
round ’n stopped. “Round with a hole in the middle.”

“Come, help me hang the icon,” Lina says. Up a ladder,
Valery and the demons (bat-winged, whiskered), hold
St Anthony aloft in Cairo’s sea-air. “Just a little lower.”

Tamara finds a creature in a burned-out warehouse.
Doesn’t even know what animal it is. Skinless. Flesh. Pink.
Quivering. She can’t touch it. So she lowers her face to it.
And waits. Its black eyes open then. And she sees it blink.

Sherah Bloor grew up in South Africa and Scotland and studied philosophy in Australia and now in the United States, where she is completing a doctorate at Harvard University on the medical history of the religious imagination. She is also the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Divinity School’s literary and arts journal, Peripheries. Her own poetry has been published in Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, and Lana Turner, among others.