Down the path between the apples <br />through the maple grove of suicides <br />then left at the old wall <br />along the wire fence to the brook- <br />bank where narcissus noses <br />into skunk cabbage and hepatica: <br />Call me Apollo, crashing in the underbrush <br />with my arrows, my bow saw and clippers <br />out for your flash of white tail and alert <br />to hack me a path to your lair, to your cult’s den, <br />crisscrossing the water with Phoebe again and again <br />as it elbows below us and runs <br />for the creek racks <br />strongest in springtime when everything’s liquid, <br />tightroping over the rocks <br />in the plashing braid, hot on your sharp <br />scent and battling the mayflies <br />the black flies horseflies mosquitoes <br />there under the raspberry brambles and getting no nearer . . . <br /> <br />Or am I fleeing your coiling uncoiling <br />tentacular embrace <br />battered and scarred, am I seeing <br />your fabled face in the oily pools, <br />are these fern hairs sprouting at your knuckles <br />branchbones, little leaves halving <br />our limbs with leaves—are they yours or mine? <br />Your bloodhounds bay at the copper <br />creek, your velvet cape’s aloft <br />in the chiaroscuro breeze, you’re near, nearer, <br />hieing, heying, I’m falling, failing, <br />gashed, gutted, kneed-up, <br />muddy and galled—call me <br />Actaeon....<br /><br />Jonathan Galassi<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/flow-20/
