Gary LeBel: L’ENFANT SAUVAGE

Don’t come another inch closer, I mean it. What gall to show up here like this today without an invitation, to steal away my summer (and all my ridiculous dreams): thief! Why, if the Shakers were here, they’d grind you into paint and be done with it.

In years past, I always dragged my feet through autumn, but now I go kicking and screaming—and you with your history, oh, such history, a knee-buckling load you refuse to lift for like a lazy student you make no distinction between Stalin and Gandhi, shooting straight up through the ‘white bones’ we scatter with a cardsharp’s wrist across the blood-soaked meadows of battles,

waving your little heads during executions, thriving in the backyards of killers, and bursting into color outside the firewalls where tired old lawyers and generals change the wording in constitutions and plan wars for post-adolescents to fight, your quiet reason always swaying to a light breeze within sight of their round-tabled bunkers,

an enfant sauvage, eyes at the edge of the wilderness,

you,

field of goldenrod.

Today, Chronos, I laze
and with a death-grip on your robe
refuse to walk: you’ll have to drag me
tooth and nail, slobbering drunk
with Sirens’ wail.

by Gary LeBel
Cumming, Georgia

Note: ‘white bones’ is from a poem of Tu Fu, originally ‘white bones, blue smoke’.