By Clare Flanagan
How did I arrive here
from where I came —
the tree limbs, the cold lodestone rock
that pulled me as a child, called to ascend
til the branches bent? I named
every hoof-beaten path
in the backyard woods, stalking birds
& berries through the dusk hours, grown voices tearing
through the box-elders, calling out
to me. I labeled maps
in thin script, hidden still
in a Midwestern basement, slipped
between half-
finished canvases and pipes
exposed. My blood ran
with the knowledge
that I would become someone. So how
did those winding trail-lines
take me here, where I feel
I have forgotten all intention? It’s a nice patch
of grass, sun-saturated. They ringed it
with buildings, named it
for the small apple trees, drought-
stunted, frozen somehow
in girlhood. In their thin shade
I read the same sentences
over and again. I am learning
how memories are encoded – traces, sketched
in neural pencil, brain-buried,
smudged bolder when they’re called
to the surface. Or perhaps
they leave the hippocampal bowels, float finchlike
to the cortical branches, sing clear
and independent of time. I think of this
as I gaze through the twig-fissures
at the California sky, sift
through decade-old networks –
buckthorn-woven, strung
with cattails, near-embalmed dreams
of being President, or
a vigilante queen. These days
I want less for myself. Before I leave here, before
I read the chapter on forgetting,
I think I’ll become Ophelia –
sink small under the lush square
of manicured grass, the green pool
deflecting voices that say
come back. Flesh
falling away like a wet dress, bone exposed
as the stark backyard granite, the boulder
ringed with tiger-lilies. How I
would strive, thin-armed, to pull my weight
to the rock’s crown, slip
down. How
I would try again.
The Sketchy Kids 