Charles Farrell © 2010 All Rights Reserved
Charles Farrell © 2010 All Rights Reserved
She Dreams of Leaving
Always in the vision
there is a train and if not
a train then some tracks
ramp and switch and triple torus
entwined in knots until it all
unwinds and climbs uphill
I am ever there for the train
and the train is never there
for me so I wait
and the waiting
changes the shape
of the dream and people
enter and leave by the many
ramps some appearing
from the ether some
ceasing to be who they were
You were there with your
illness wrapped in a jacket
blond hair tucked
in a pocket Always
there is a train and a wall
to lean against a rail
between us some water
below So remember to measure
each slow exhale for the train
is now a boat and the boat
is ashore We board
and are borne away
***
She Wants to Dissolve Into Light
reappear—
as white winter alder,
water roiling over stones. Cold,
aglow. All night she listened
as shots departed a rifle’s house, ignited
a fire within the buck’s breast
the river doused. The moon
a body broken, an offering
the bare floor accepted, a blessing
she circumnavigated. Breath
cleaves from breath,
flesh from bone,
bone from other bones. She’s seen
salmon work the stones
then abandon battered
rafts of their bodies to bear,
cougar, and other hungers of night.
She anchors confessions
to an antler
shed in the river’s midst,
slick stones underfoot,
grasps its ghost white limb
with a fallen branch. Closer in,
its broken tip, a window
into marrow, she turns away.
Days she wavers between flesh
and possession, weight
of blood in her hands, of bone.
Nights she loses herself
in the forgiveness of water.
Ronda is the author of Shedding Our Skins (Finishing Line Press, 2008) and Some Other Eden, (2005). Nominated several times for the Pushcart, Ronda is the recipient of a 2007 Artist Trust GAP Grant, finalist for the 2010 May Swenson Poetry Award, and is currently an editorial assistant for Crab Creek Review.