tree before sky
darklaced and wide
galloping green beneath
to make you weep, had you
tears left. heart hammering
with the horses hooves. they
thought they'd lead you, tame
and trotting across the campus
green, but you kicked your naked
heels and clung with bare thighs,
breasts bounding, elbows down. you
said yes to this job because like a fish
leaping to the light on the end of a line
flashed the times you'd rode your uncle's horse
- the few enough times in your life you'd ever had
something hard/soft between your legs that responded
to your own command. The students yell Go Godiva Go and
your heart pounds, pounds, pounds, pounds with the hooves
of this nag-turned-Pegasus. Tomorrow you are back to turning
enough tricks to pay the debts addictions have incurred, the addictions
debts have incurred. Above you trees and a sky bluer than his eyes, your
wide-eyed child you haven't seen since sixteen; bluer than blood-in-veins;
bluer than the blues you sing when you shower alone; bluer than the five dollar bills
you earn the easy way. Easy now, easy and your mount slows and you head between the buildings
and into the lot, they got their money's worth of naked women on horseback, five hundred dollar tradition
and a freedom for you that slides in your veins without a syringe, a remembering, a letting, instead of forgetting.
2 comments:
The tree shape is beautiful, and very hard to do! And this telling of the Godiva story is so sensual. "Like a fish leaping to the light" and "something hard/soft between your legs that responded" and the irony of "easy" - whoa. The reader is forced to become the peeping tom; we love her and we hate ourselves for it.
Is it a tree, or the lower half of a breast? : )
I like the rhymes , alliterations, and assonances here (e.g. "sky" and "wide," and then all the e sounds in the first few lines). Except "heart hammering with the horse's hooves" has one too many h's -- can you change "hammering" perhaps? I also wondered if you needed "pounds" repeated four times... but I hesitate to suggest changes that will spoil the shape!
And I like all the associations of blue toward the end. Nicely done.
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