BY PETER GRANDBOIS
You were born in the stillness
between elms and
like branches you were raised
on creak and moan
*
Five years old and you can’t imagine
why there are days without snow
days when the need for another
language can overwhelm
*
Eleven and what you do not sing
already a circle feeding on itself
like the Bullsnake you grabbed by the tail
hoping to keep it from its home
*
Fourteen and you enter your own whale
crawling the sewer beneath the field
toward old toward groan toward “O
what a dank and sorrowful realm”
*
At sixteen you wear the crow of silence
like a shield its wings trapping you
in the center of your friends
as if we belonged to ourselves
*
At twenty-one you search for a doorway
into the body no matter the mouth
mapping the way as you walk only
to find you carried the emptiness within
*
Thirty-seven and you are born each time
the voice calls you to a house of words
a day made of sand from the other shore
It scares you that the voice is not your own
*
Forty-seven and the language of you
disappears like a brown bat chasing
an echo into the red river’s roar
the nettle’s bloom the only clue
*
Fifty-four and you’ve slept forever
on a bed of roots where memory
bleeds to black dreaming of your house
but it is here inside this poem
*
Of what lies beyond, we know nothing
except how the body lies holy
except how what we do not sing clothes us
in light
except how the dazzle of wings within us
might survive
Peter Grandbois is the author of eleven books. His work has appeared in over one hundred journals. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.
Process Note: This poem was born out of the intense feeling of time passing and how there’s nothing we can do about it. The poem is a reflection on a life lived, looking back at the most significant moments, significant because they marked the branching of a new and different me. For the poem is also a meditation on how many different selves exist inside us, how when we look back through the years, it’s almost impossible to recognize those other versions of ourselves. In the end it is a song celebrating those versions.