poem 19: Self Portrait at 21 Years

Self Portrait at 21 Years

I.
I have tumbled upon that ridge
so many times I learned
the language of that single mountain.
Lately I’ve been yearning
for that western state
where I could have drank myself
into a coma after this world started trying
to burn me up (or drown me).
I’m just putting my cheek to the wind.

Even here, in Ohio, with her slow
transition into winter this year,
I’ve been a harvest ready
apple with no predator.
I have never been afraid
but I admit that the end of autumn

terrifies me. It would be easy
to love this place less.

II.
And of all the men I’ve slept with
and all the women I’ve wanted badly,
I know that like two different species
we could never need the same things.

But somehow I loved them all.
It’s taken me all this time to learn to live,
but lovers, I understand now
your lives are your own lives.

III.
All the ways they called me animal:
-feline
-avian
-wretched
-some sad, wild beast
-already extinct and gone
-I’ve missed you so

IV.
I am the negative of a photo
of someone you loved once.

Tape me to the windowpane
next to your bed; at night
hold me up just once
to the artificial light
of your reading lamp.

V.
In the bedroom, the bar,
the hull of a ship, in the attic,
his studio, the post-harvest garden,
in the dry basement of a friend’s house,
I heard it. You either hear it
or you don’t—that pulsing echo,
its way of saying: none of us will make it
out of here alive. Its way of saying:
you wolf, do something with yourself.



-m.g.b. october 9, 2010



Notes:
This is a first and last draft of this poem. It seems appropriate this way.
A sentiment from a couple of lines from this poem has been lifted from James Wright’s “Voices Between Waking and Sleeping in the Mountains.”