Magazine

Going Into the Woods, by Christine Boese

Curving images overlap in place

M:

What if I had stayed

hunkered in the Ozarks

while you fed your head,

let the land go as dry oatmeal?

E:

If you had stayed

with your mushy metaphysics,

Magician? Your Thoreau was

a construction of his mother's

trips with groceries. You are

what you eat. I make it grow.

M:

Who eats now, fields dull and heavy

with wilting wheat? You call and

I'm your rainmaker. You can't even

feed me. I ride on the updrafts,

hot, fiery dirvishes I seed

with dust and water. Some Great

Mother, eight dirty faces waiting

behind your skirts, waiting to feed

on your empty bounty, and me,

22 and honest, I come to serve

the image that swirls between us.

E:

You conjure only vapor! Reflecting

water droplets, leftover smoke seeds.

You make a fiction, all is a fiction.

Go back to your Ozarks. This ground

need not grow; if it did, who would know?

M:

Redeye ham fat browned into gravy,

spread over a biscuit, gray and sodden.

You had eight years to plant and build.

I come in on a fatback rain, hard drops

beading in fine dust, in tire ruts,

like interstate on a ridgetop, flattened

stripe of grass growing up the middle.

E:

So send apocalyptic flood, go ahead.

I'll shake shaggy trees lush with late growth,

modeling vainly the wind. There, my

blue-black earth, deep as mud

in a drying ball field in Des Moines.

There, the West slides into the ocean.

M:

Ho, my Empress. Where is your fiction?

Mother, you grow, vision lost in abundance.

What, for your children? What now, for you?

E:

Nothing grows in rows, and even

your swirling pipe can't walk

a straight line. Beauty serves

its maker, lush resounding

fiction. I care little what it makes,

only that it grows.