Trying
Like reading a book
called Inner Skiing because
I wanted a mind that would glide.
Not clump with thought.
Like the hang gliding lesson where,
strapped into wings, I straight-armed the frame
and dream-ran toward the edge. Tried
flight for a turkey’s second.
Like falling down a full flight
of stairs and laughing. Shocked
at parents running toward me.
That was the end of sock feet in the house.
Thinking if I did enough sit-ups,
dead lifts, skull-shining breaths, I might
finally align, reach that high C, be
the shimmery tuning fork, keep going.
For now I am belly-flopped on a flat
bed of blue. Doctor with confident jaw,
athletic nurse and talk of snow conditions
fill the room until the doctor skis
precisely into my backside, keeps going.
Press-pull pressure obliterates
sense for longer than God
Where are you?
Then, I meet my geology:
Nurse presents a tiny test-rod
cored from my hip bone. It will tell how
I’m doing as a mechanism for being.
Data from marrow. An après ski read.
Will they catch the notes in the margins
on what it is to be this wishful,
this weighty, this density?
The doctor asks me to say how it felt and I
can only think of every death I have held,
like the ground falling away at the missing
moment I stopped trying.
.
Jeanne L. Bamforth has been published in Balancing Act 2, an Anthology of Poems by Maine Women (Littoral Books) and the Northern New England Review. Jeanne lives on Merrymeeting Bay, an inland confluence of six rivers near the coast of Maine.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 