“If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
--Yogi Berra
They’re nothing, too puny, too few – those gone-beyond-finding mothers, brothers. They
lie down in deep grass, claiming wildness, poisoned with tameness. The air is their cage,
water their blind alleys, always circling back. You who live on land, that’s nothing too,
the nothing between sky and the black roots underground. They can’t live there, and
neither can you.
# # #
We argue about water and wind – we switch sides. You fly, I swim. No sieve to catch
that slow seeping. It’s not blood, just whatever trickles away and is never exhausted,
never over. Tiny domestic drains – sink, bathtub, water swirling against the clock.
Impossibly distant poles are leaving no choice. Bore through the earth to the other side,
where water shifts direction. With the clock or against it -- nothing changes.
# # #
Once, she began, a girl lived happily in the not-forever-after. One morning was the
morning before, then the missing after. But that unhappened. The angel of yesterday
swooped down and slashed tomorrow in two. Now there were two girls, the one who
lived happily in the ever-after and the one who didn’t. That can happen for you, too.
Open your arms to the black angel – die to your old life. Someone else will live that life,
someone who once was you. Let her not imagine that forking path. It will be too bitter –
better to live out her bent life in the other after. It too was a way to go.
-- Patricia Carlin
Patricia Carlin's books include Second Nature, QUANTUM JITTERS and ORIGINAL GREEN all from Marsh Hawk Press. She has published widely in journals and anthologies such as Boulevard, BOMB, Verse, American Letters & Commentary, Pleiades, POOL, The Literary Review, The Manhattan Review, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency; and she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and VCCA. She teaches literature and poetry writing at The New School, and she co-edits the poetry journal Barrow Street.
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