Ars Poetica as Escape Route

                        after Erin Slaughter


There are times I tried water, 
thought of holding you

just above me 
a pail, tipping.

Times I tried 
not to be

all fire and wind, all empty 
waiting for smother.

I could not make you 
a mountain pass,

the fall sunset hours I tried 
to find the window, the offer

dwindling
safety to another world.

Always I thought
I can’t have been a body

in the leaden space where no one wants 
there to be a body, a case

where no poet
wants to hear confession

anymore. I learned 
you, the way you learn

the surface by watching
your own breath bubbles escape.

I could make no name 
for the aftertornado but

air, but piles of wood 
and bones flooding

the morning road.
There, no word but

go, and fix the fences 
and clear the paths,

no word for the absence of 
sound, the axe, the handle herself

carved from stormfelled trunks, 
fitted to steel to make

a swinging thing, a brushwood cry rent 
in the gripping spring.

Read more from Issue 20.2.