Text Box: Text Box: The Story

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the body labyrinth    poems by Sharon Berg

 

By Sharon Berg

Established January 3, 2006

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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.

 

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