|
UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
|
|
MICHELE LEAVITT
Seven to Life Why did I stay? His hands, like carved white pine, touched my swollen face, and it was better than no touch at all. It was never good. The day we met, I chased a starling from my window to the open air, it left small black feathers pasted on the frame. We had both read Dostoevsky, both suffered beatings from those that we adored, and didn't we believe that suffering purifies the soul? North country winters kill all that's weak and inessential --- split limbs of tamaracks, warblers that put off leaving until the first big snow. I don't believe it now, but then, suffering was the only door out of the dinginess of wanting, out of a life as empty as a hollowed-out t.v. And today, if I were to open that door, hed be there, the one face that never fades. The one face I never want to see again. I meant to leave him, asleep in a wooden room, I was wearing bad shoes, too skimpy for the walk across the frozen Kennebec to the next town. I stayed with friends, rolled in a red sleeping bag on a linoleum floor, but I was bad luck, no fun, always in the way. He tracked me down, and cried. I meant to leave.
* * *
Rail tracks run along the river, the river-road, the throat, the vein, all passageways that must have destinations. I meant to travel, got hung up on the whistle stops along the way. Fields of daffodils, too golden to bear, their heads nodding as mine did above a red kitchen table, and a glassine bag, holding one more dose, labeled 7 - 2 -Life. A dealer's idea of poetry. A prison term. A destiny. Till death do us part. Glassine, so smooth, sounding like a stream I could slip away on. I meant to leave him dead in that apartment, with all the bills, the rented furniture, the borrowed Navy blanket covering our stained bed, stenciled "U. S., us, a bad joke. I did get out. I poured oblivion down all my body's rivers. I forgot how to stay.
* * *
Still, my guts hold an appetite for drama, for a man who'll lift me by my shoulders, kiss my breasts one moment, slam me up against a wall the next, wailing he knows another man has touched me, then get on his knees to beg forgiveness. I've carried this craving from town to town, this lust for pain and touch to make my life feel real, this habit harder to kick than the dope. It's time to clean up my hand. I keep going out, climbing the trail that crawls up the mountainside from my cabin. Sometimes, an eagle and a flock of ravens circle the peak, fighting their little wars. They swoop and scream and tear at one another. Like what I remember lovers to be. I always want to leave, but if the eagle's white tail is backlit by the sun, there's eerie grace in their battling in the lonely air: they are the only life, relief from the emptiness of heaven, so I stay. They make prey of each other, dripping their blood and fluff down the ridge fissures, where it mixes with the springmelt that rushes now, too, toward riverbeds etched like veins in the granite of the valley floor. I meant to leave it all, stranded high up on the bank, in fragments left for dead, forgetting. Michele Leavitt is a former trial attorney who now teaches in The Writing Program at the University of North Florida. Her poems and essays have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Rattapallax, The NeoVictorian/Cochlea, Slant, Sojourner, The Humanist, Wind, The Ledge, Yellow Silk II: International Erotic Stories and Poems, Asheville Poetry Review, The Edge City Review, and THEMA. |
|
© 2007 Underground Voices |
|
|