| Braziel: Five Poems Page 3 | ||
Slipping We split the tree into firewood, loaded them into the back of the truck and took them home to dry for winter. For a week that summer we sawed oaks and black gums in the forest. I remember walking across the downed boles, balancing, pretending that a gorge was below, an empty space taken from the earth, ready to take me as well. I was ready to fall, to feel the crush of a hard earth breaking me bone by bone into the smallest pieces before my father's eyes. He would gather me up then,  | take me home for winter and build me into fires to keep us warm. Slowly through a season I would turn into coal, into ash, be gone. The soft mud and moss were an illusion - the sharp gorge as real as the nervous splintering of my legs under saw and bone. Only when my father called me back to work did the empty space disappear and my hands become full again of pieces of wet oak, no longer grabbing at invisible trunks of air to keep me from wanting and falling.  | |
