Sunday, November 1, 2009

Horror Stories

Pages of frost hurtle off the metal roof
as I begin to faint in class again.
This time, it's the rueful laugh in "Out, Out -"
that rims the world with spreading pools of blood.
My hands are cold and the next hour snakes ahead
of me narrowly like a salted path through rimed,
rattling grass-leaves. Too many poems put my lights
out. Too many leave the bones exposed, the gore
leaking, clumps of hair with the scalp attached
discarded in the sawdust. They're worse than life,
than the classics professor who scissored off a finger
a beat before the bell, trimming flowers
her husband sent because he's off to war
again. She is, I presume, getting medical help
right now. She will be, I imagine, fine in the end.
Damaged, but okay. The clouds will blow
off, and the crashing knives of ice will shatter
harmlessly on the ground. My blood pressure
will come back from whatever resort it's been skiing at
along safely cleared roads with the stereo blasting -
no, that's a student's cell phone and I'm still
in class. The rhythms of questions, sentence sounds.
They're waiting for me. We'll be fine in the end.

~Lesley Wheeler, Heathen (2009)

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