In the Hall
It’s
a shock so visceral your tongue condenses
into
milk. There’s no swallowing. You
forget how
words
form, how they’re spoken through teeth and lips.
Both
are cloaked pier posts in this fog, this thin hall that leads out
and
off the roof of your mouth, down stairs
your throat has known
all
your life as easy. You’ve never before seen
anyone
who
has choked to death. Or dropped exhausted. Or
drowned. Now, because this is new to you, the thick
pads
of your feet hum and the tips of
your toes! They burn.
In a space you once knew
better than
the
cat walls start to contract; in a place where for years
you
never stubbed a thing suddenly every table leg, every
door
jamb’s a baseball bat hitting every limb and patch
of skin at each pitch. Drunk
on the news of the lake you can’t make it
to
the end without knocking
into
the table, and that clay knick-knack
sister
loved and played with tips
over
the way you saw her spill out of the boat. Horse
and
rider collide with the floor the way you collided
the
beach: wide as a mouth and packed with feet but fish slick
so
that it’s only by some miracle you and this ceramic
Remington
Bronco don't bust don't hit hard
enough
to break. It alone skids beneath a highboy.
And
it will be forgotten. It will be flat
on
its flank and cheek until next spring
when
you move the cabinet and the dust
drifts
in the cloth-clotted wind, in the open-behind-
you-window
wind lifting the winter off her favorite
(sought
to bury with her, but thought lost) thing:
rearing,
neighing, rider’s arm up, chaps straight out
at
the boot never falling off, never falling in
to
anything but neck and mane and sky.
Never
water. Never down your choking on lake water throat. Not
ever.
