Jane Zwart

Mapparium

Mary Baker Eddy Library
Boston, MA

I thought we would be able to walk into that world alone,
or nearly alone, through a door built into equatorial seas. 

I wanted our whispers to carry under the earth’s glass crust
like underground water, like magma, like a seam of something 

rare and molten, and I wished--I will not lie--the noisy kids
who shared Mary Eddy’s library with us back home to Shanghai. 

Any kid, any crowd, I would have wished away. I wanted
a secret planet in which to love you, and here were the young 

pointing to their country, orange and enormous; here was
their chaperone, tracing, like an astronomer, the wide red dome 

over her head, the Soviet north.
                                                              And then they sang. We did not
know the song. But we wore it, we wore its unfamiliarity  

like couples wear hotel robes: the same milk and honey
with separate sleeves. We wore it and stood, a junior high choir 

between us, inside a fragile globe, and it was more intimate
than nakedness. If we were the last two on earth, how blandly

we would love. Were we never kept from one another by hymns
sung in other tongues, how chaste a kiss would taste.

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Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have previously appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares and TriQuarterly, as well as other journals and magazines.