ECHO
In truth I am a bat-cave unto myself
and just as scientists have yet to fly like me
without calamity, I know not what I do.
These days even my own flesh and blood,
which is to say my body, does not trust
me with it. I can barely contain
myself. This was supposed to be
a love poem. I am sorry it never is. Let me
assure you that I am no prize and let us talk
of other things. Here is the story
where we build a house with walls and floors
and nails tucked away in wood planks
where they belong. Here, tulips in a milk bottle.
Here, mussels in a copper pan. Butter
on the toast and a shoe beneath the bed.
But this is not a story at all or not the one
I wrote to myself, supine on a stranger’s
kitchen floor already turning
to be chastised. A series of wrongheaded
hands and then a right one. Yours. Must I
live by gut or sunspots, the legs
gone out from under me? I had hoped
it was not so. I have long suspected
I am lovely with my beady eyes
and leathern wings but that is insufficient
for my purposes. I lurk outside my life
like the vampire of legend waiting to be
invited in. One day, trains will stop
asking me to find out where they go
and I will cease my hoving down the tracks
like quicksilver. I’ve been mercury, been
poison and I keep on clutching my head
and talking to nothing, would turn myself in-
side out to be empty. I thought I saw
a man by the river but it wasn’t a man
it was you. I thought I was alone
but it was you. I thought it was daybreak
on a tall and dangerous bridge, or my own
claws clinging to the little they understood
but those things were you. I thought it was
just air beneath me and it really was
just air but you were there too.
hilary dobel
