And now, it’s here: every
board a law, each nail a tree. its
slithery steps made smooth with
the waiting. We stood in the silent
inertia of the grass, in that rain, its
dying drops falling on our hats, in
bloodless, questionless hum. This is
for someone else to fix, we said,
waiting. And oh, how we slipped
on the stairs of the scaffold,
apologized to the official man
who helped us up, muffled
our feet with the mud, with the mud,
with the mud, carried it in our footprints
like birthright. I couldn’t, but
kept standing. It’s so hard
to fall.
–
B.A. Van Sise is an author, curator and photographic artist with three monographs. For nonfiction he has been a finalist for the Travel Media Awards for feature writing and is a winner of the Lascaux Prize for Nonfiction, and for poetry he has been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize and Kenyon Poetry Prize, and a winner of the Colonel Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards and the Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medal, twice.
