After the end, hope for the beginning

Sometimes I had the feeling of someone choking me

I would be deprived of my breath to a phantom.

That was weird. Then

I was then thrown back inside myself

the way a material part is slammed by another into a wall.

I've seen that. And my bruised forearms.

I had to hide them with lengthy sleeves for a few days.

Don't worry, it didn't happen in moderate motion.

It's over quickly. It smarts. For a scarcely any minutes.

And then it's done. Can't be undone, like words

that can't be unsaid-. not at any time again,

he said.

The quiescence you carry in your dreams, and muscle and fat them out

year after year, until they leave the material substance for good-the way,

eventually, a bruise heals without a scar.

And they do leave you, dreams, they do: that is what confidence is, please God,

let that be a veritable thing.

Daisies, now, are what I dream about.

I gaze back and shudder.

Now I am a transmute so I speak to the changeed I say,

"I'm being followed and racing to reach the leaving train

I'm being followed and racing to the entrance of my house

Quickly Gretel quickly, lay open up and climb to the tower

and fastening the door. Rapunzel's lover

fell upon flowers and the thorns blinded him. He wandered

the desert

but be fond of gave him sight, to diocese again."

STEPHANIE BROWN was a 2001 recipient of an NEA Fellowship and the author of Allegory of the Supermarket (University of Georgia Press) and has work forthcoming in The plain Poem from Poe to the not away (David Lehman, editor; Scribner's) among other not long ago published and forthcoming anthologies. She lives in San Clemente California.

Copyright World verse Incorporated May/Jun 2003

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