Ars Poetica
Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie
Wild animals,
for whom sunrise
is the boot heel in the side,
who are riderless
save for the invisible jockey of survival
who run because their destiny
is running and because wild means
there is no gap between destiny and will
and no will beyond the will of muscle
Wild animal
when I overtake you,
clasp your heaving neck between my legs
count the pulse in your artery against my thigh
and name that pulse
and whisper its name
into your pricked ear
When I recite the names of what you are not
you are not grass
you are not lake
you are not sunrise,
but rather the puppet of sunrise.
You are a thought I had not known was mine
When I string you up by the mouth like a puppet
slip my alien fingers
between your leather lips
and serve cold metal to your tongue,
teach you to turn at the twitch of my wrist,
it may seem like dominion
but it is not dominion
For I was born to sit astride my own thoughts and pound the earth
and you were born to bear me. This litany
I whisper in your ear as you succumb
is as true aas blood
and lets like blood.
I do not break you for the racetrack
I do not break you for show
I break you because all I have
is speech and spindly legs,
and because your leather lips
can only blow on the water
they cannot name a ripple.
But together
we might overtake the sun
together be sunrise
be lake be grass
forget the gap
between our two bodies
that you might teach me wild
and I, let wild speak