Please don’t let me live like this forever,
numb to the June wind’s stirring touch.

Squirrels are bickering in the maples
like so much noise, the sky is the blue of the sky,
the gimlet-eyed deer hoist my heart on a pike.

It’s wasted on me, the lenitive murmur of the creek,
the vulture’s splayed wings drawing shadow
like a chariot down the rutted road.

These limbs are not my limbs.
These thoughts are not my thoughts.

Take them and return to me
my kneading hands, loaves of bread,
my sturdy legs, the mountain’s crest
and valley pooling greenly below me.

Return to me the mind’s sylvan hush,
its dappled cool no fevered thought could touch

like a tongue of flame to the self’s foundering trunk,
like a lightning strike to cleave the crown,
rend bark from the raw, red wood of the heart.

The forest is filled with trees stripped and hollow,
bowed but bound by a stubborn root;
the wind moans through them;
they’re learning to loosen their grip on the earth.

But just this morning,
I hefted a felled tree from the creek's stony bank,
from atop a sapling pinned beneath its weight
who, after weeks of strain, sprang
like a hare from a trap, flexed its crooked neck,
perked its leaves as if called to by the rush of air.

If there’s anything left in me
that still answers to my name,
lifts its weary head at the soft stroke of the wind,
I’ll hold fast to the earth until I learn to love
even the stone’s bruise, the splintered limb.
I’ll work my teeth to the bone to slip this trap.

—Zoe Boyer

Poet’s Website

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