Her Bid for Freedom (poem)

 

 

 

Her Bid for Freedom

 

She could never bear to be herself

Dressed in a red coat, dandyish, a cynosure

“People stare.”

These words were for the angel at her side

Known by puckering air, a fragmented hair’s-width

or garment’s hem

One enveloping unseen form

That moves through leaves and makes

Crushed mould-remains of leaves

Rise and sink again

Black-encircled crimson echoes like a train passing

signal posts

The angel’s wings span the street from chimneytop to

chimneytop

Allying stranger’s houses, bricking over

Her bid for freedom

The faces she had seen

Those in windows pulling curtains back

A pallid mist on a water glass, with a siren’s whistle

A hollow and lye-etched pair of eyes

I believe they’re still where I saw them last, and always will―

 

But you never leave me now

 

She never leaves

Something like a shroud

Done in netting drapes her and each knot connecting

Flares as though the light were catching

The bristles of a Christmas garland

 

“I am made of washed bones sunk, gathered

Hands torn apart and severed

I am made by drops and by drops as the

cavern’s hourglass

in an eon grows

The jagged upthrust and the weeping fall

Will meet, and you will meet

Your day and mine draw close”

 

 

 

---

Her Bid for Freedom

See more poetry in The Poor Belabored Beast

Adverse Possession

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2015, Stephanie Foster)