Heather Christle
THREE POEMS
Circumvention
Sometimes I have not read,
have only looked at words
like I am at camp and someone
short-sheeted the bed—
have you ever done that?
Or made someone pee
just by willing it?
There are frequent opportunities
to behave like a human.
Many people have a fear
of falling off a mountain.
You can’t fault them for it
even if you want to,
even if you are in the middle
of falling off what
they should really fear:
the undercover wagon
going West. Probably
we live in an understudy world
and the real world’s gallivanting
happily along, reading
fan mail, not keeling over—
I’ve heard the real world
is so strong and abnormally
healthy that doctors think
something must be wrong.
After church
Anyway, you said, it was only a mild,
everyday catastrophe. I nodded, but
couldn’t say if I agreed. I was becoming
less and less certain of everything.
Was the word I meant “distance”
or “difference?” The cigarette
smoke was a distance, but the sky?
And if here we were, sitting on lawn chairs,
then whose had we left at the dump?
I had to shake it all off.
You were looking off into the
word that I could not determine.
I thought if I were to reach out and touch you,
I’d probably start with your scalp.
YOU SAID YOU WEREN’T A BRONTOSAURUS BUT YOU HAD NEVER WATCHED YOURSELF EATING LETTUCE.
You also said I was no picnic,
so I agreed and quickly hid
the red and white checkered tablecloth
I had recently stolen from the local pizzeria.
I am sorry, Louie, I had said,
backing away with my gun.
I was only trying desperately
to make us stay in love.
I suggested that we run at full speed
into the hallway wall, that maybe
we could realign our thinking.
But when I turned to look
you were back in the kitchen
stringing necklaces from macaroni.
It was your job. And my job
was to educate the pigeons
through a long-distance
online course on meteorology.
Do you remember how we would
slowly empty the refrigerator and weep?
The mournfulness of pudding
was our common obsession.
But it could not stop the mountain
between us from becoming first
a biscuit, then an ant farm,
then a draft of the cable network
so dominantly pretty that to gaze
at anything else would have destroyed us
gradually, meaningfully, letting purpose
embroider tropical scenes on our foreheads,
which by then we could not bring
to face one another, so pale
and full of thanks had we become.
photo by Dennie Eagleson
Heather Christle is the author of Heliopause, What Is Amazing, The Difficult Farm, and The Trees The Trees, which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award. Her poems appear in recent or forthcoming issues of Boston Review, London Review of Books, New England Review, and The New Yorker.