In the end it’s always bondage that drives you
into the quick of clarity, lifts the latch
and throws you back on your hinges. To do with
that boy going down in a snag hole and from there
to where the water hovers on the live edge
of an ice floe in the moss above the stream
and stops there, makes adjustments and allows for
how the status quo is just one more force field
in which there are places you go willingly
or you don’t go at all. Here it arcs into
the supernatural, which originates
from constraints, where it’s caught before it cascades
into an icefall. Where, out of nowhere, it
fans out in shoals of breakage over breakage,
leaflike in tiny, vascular cross sections
of the intricate, what first sight could be like
for an infant cribbed close to window-glass frost.
Your comprehension cracks in two. That boy had
a taste to him, a phantom distastefulness,
was what I thought. Hate, my approximations
of it, that one-of-a-kind word for escape
from one’s own wallowing, had placed him grown rank
with tubers downhill from leakage, pigs quartered
overly close and trough-deep up to their rinds,
and I had stood there. Stood there putting a shine
on each flawless weight of consideration,
lifting them onto the balance pans one by
incremental one, to be lost, meaning found,
in contemplation. I stood there and the ice
formed around a particle wholly foreign,
the filament lodged in the shell by way of
introduction, which is conscience and the seat
of smallest truths. The perpetual follows,
there will be women sitting on the bank, there
will be clattering on, Ball jars, crockery,
and you must run shouting, “Dougie’s going down,”
there’s no getting out from under it, always
the hairline crack in your own porcelain, ever
the quicker the better, one less word to be said.
Audrey Bohanan is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Any Keep or Contour (Waywiser), a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.
Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash