In the Hall

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.