Free verse poetry by
Mary Catherine Harper

So we walked to the Natural Bridge
Red River Gorge falling below us
walked in forests of rhododendron
limestone walls our home for the week
we straying with purpose from tourist
trails off the old Sheltowee Trace
each path leading to yet another path
the grand adventure of our summer

a summer as packed with local stories
as trails to find and lose and find again
all of them stories of imprudent sorry death
like the Promethean boy atop Gray's Arch
stepping backward falling falling from
the keystone as his shirt went up in flames
or the one two three no four teens it seems
trying to piss in the middle of the night
over the cliff without fully stepping out of
their sleeping bags of goosedown
and that ever-so-slippery ripstop fabric

once the slide begins there’s no stopping it
no stopping it for two three four white boys
so a native says with a knowing look
crossing his face says that only in the fall from
that one side of Gray’s Arch can you see
the inobtrusive Indian Arch standing watch
further down the trail its elegant curve
hidden from the tourists tramping in line
with nearby ridges their footprints
bound to trails that fear what so many
of us think of as the deep of wilderness

I waved to you,
the smudged window between us,
your yellow bus blundering
over a worn speed bump.

You flattened your fingertips
and face against the glass,
its transparency inviting intimacy,
holding our eyes.

You smiled through me then,
focused on wanderings not unlike
the paths my new red tennis shoes
desired to tramp.

Your breath warming the glass
between your smile and my shoes,
between my eyes and your distance
as the bus disappeared.

Keeping extremists in my pocket
where I can feel their marble-round
bombs against my smooth fingertips
and count them, numbering one two
three four, reassuring me of the fact―
please it must be a fact―of the limits
of such raw chaos in the world.

Not paranoid, I swear to you, having
seen out of the corner of my eye
the flash of gunfire in the building
where I worked and felt the pinch
of shrapnel in my chest, my lung
collapsing into these ribs still attached,
miraculously, to my swaying spine.

Invisible wounds beginning to heal,
itching like the prickled feeling
at the nape of your neck when evil
slips in behind, when terrorists slide
under the door of this room, its oddly
decorated walls of heavy-textured pillows,
where you seem to be living these days.

Eating with bendable forks and knives
made of highly carcinogenic plastic,
so dangerous it glows when you turn out
the lights, the plastic blazing when you sing
lullabies to me in a voice that, I swear,
sounds exactly like my mother, except
she died in the explosion, so you say.

The question of desire
the philosopher says is not
a question of what we lack,
rather what is inside
pushing itself outward,
a crashing rainstorm in
February, pouring itself
upon students sprinting
from building to building,
the last campus snow hills
dissolving suddenly
into the now-rising
lake that will be a quad
of grass come April.

The sky giving voice to
desire in the rumble falling
on skylights and slanted
windows of the art gallery
down the new-waxed hall.

My lungs suffocating to
the point of collapse,
this cold sky drenching me,
this watery lover come too early
to be enjoyed, my expectation
of pleasure not yet dreamed on
in these days of winter light.

Please, leave me to that gallery
with the plate glass wall,
the pale southern light washed
across a vast canvas of faces
more open than the pose of
a Modigliani, the attenuated
limbs ready to slip off
their taut cloth into the body
of a narrow vase already filled
beyond capacity with red
splashing poppies, crammed  
into the top and side and central
space of a neighbor canvas
more modestly sized than theirs.

Please, wait for my response
when you've become the April
greening rain, warm enough
to stand in, with my tongue
out and my face turned
toward the heavens
falling soft upon me.

I can almost imagine that
cloudy month’s desire soaking
me, warm rain to porous
bone, filling in the caverns
that have grown year after year
at the core of my body.

This, my holding back
the rush of spring flood
until it comes calling
as it should, when it should.