Text Box: Text Box: The Story

This Coach House Press publication is out of print. The site is maintained as reference only.

the body labyrinth    poems by Sharon Berg

 

By Sharon Berg

Established January 3, 2006
Sign my Guestbook from Bravenet.com Get your Free Guestbook from Bravenet.com

Comments since July 26, 2007
Text Box: The Delta Labyrinth Text Box: This is the brick path, there is no beginning, no end, but it follows the roll of hills, the pitch of rumbling oceans. It is day 9,957 yet I still have only these empty arms and an unrhymed song in 27 couplets. My walk is not hurried. I examine the details of landscape, looking under stones where the triangular blight waits, a leech that fastens ring-like and heavy dragging the left hand. My body is scarred by mouths. I examine my dreams also. My shins scraped on the rough bark of trees I climbed to search my own horizons, and fell from, sheet of white knotted and torn, as the treelimb broke like toothpicks. Under that leafy scout I lay with my falling pressed into my back, limbs thrown star-like and unearthly. A chorus rang in my ears then whispered my name across light years of space. I dreamed myself a journey. Now someone walks ahead of me on this winding path, filling the sky with smoky signals that sting and smother the lung, talking of union. Leagues between us, I follow the cinder and ash, my empty arms an unstrung harp, my legs a machine that pummels the path, the unending path. Pulse quickening, my heart slips from its station and runs manic on its own circular path, nosing dead end fingers and toes. Between the lungs it almost falters, starts up again, staccato talk chasing down the smoky red coat of that stranger. He has assumed the image of man, dressing it in hooves and horns, the pincers of the crab, and walked away with it. I have assumed the journey. I am on the brick path, the cinder- starred path with my whistling Matilda. The wind sings in the mountains above me and the ocean rolls over grumbling in its bed below me. The path reaches far ahead and far behind. Just over the rise there is a man with a campfire under his coat and the story, the story, the story.

The Story is a poem from Love Poems, the third section of the book. The Body Labyrinth by Sharon Berg (1984) Coach House Press, Ontario, Canada. It is also the last poem of the last section in the book.

 
Text Box: Visit my other interests at Big Pond Rumour. * The Press * The Zine *Online Writers Community

Website design by Sharon Berg          Site last updated July 3o, 2007

All text and concept on this site is © Sharon Berg, 2007   

No portion may be reproduced by any means, electronic or print, without the prior written permission from Sharon Berg.