I follow you as far as I can follow you—far as anyone can draft backwards
through dream. Your gunbelt’s thud slung to the landing, brass bullets
paired in porcelain bowl—
What if I met you face to face, instead?
On a routine pullover for a dead
headlight, w/my most apologetic face—
everything’s left ajar: half cleaned stove & heavy book of statistics you won
our fights with leafed so open I can almost follow its legalese,
quitclaim scent of
what if I flashed you my breasts to sway
you from issuing a ticket. We’d have to
be 20 again for this to work, I’d have
your cologne & mildewed heat of the damp door, post storm, post lights
lightning-ed to abyss. No wonder night let 40 frogs breach our
kitchen’s deep linoleum
to be desperate for you not to see
what’s in the glove box, not to check
my Missouri warrant for arrest—
corners, fat frogs filling the dark with croakish ease. It hardly has to do with
following us, this scene—but how Revelation stuns a body with
scared bare feet, so suddenly
this proposition assumes my unassailable
charms could disarm you, small &
blond as I am, it depends on
each arch chambers a brain to sweat out how long to stand cocked—how
best proceed, should a slimy thing muddle us for its holy host &
hurl itself into my shirt,
your believing: I mean you no
harm, Officer, check these
puppies, aren’t they (supple) innocent?
your mouth, or worse—what if a force of frogs thronged our artless limbs
asunder & dredged us back by body-hairs to the dank pool from
whence they came, till
But what if hours deeped the road
so dark you met me in silhouette
form, my hair caught under a cap, my
our last words arose, two bubbles, so anonymous, so same no one—not
even the lake—could identify us beyond surface names. We’ve never
stood so treatied in a room
broad back chalking the frame you saw
that night the Tom Brown prisoner
broke free—pre dash-cam, pre
together, sans judgment of each other’s claims to have been the better human—
never understood so well without speech, our fate
depends on that of visitors
cell-cam days & what if no bystander
surveils our meeting, so it’s Your Word Vs.
My Word, we think, when I pull
to this house, this storm that’s rendered us blinder than the frogs who see
us sharp as gator-teeth. Lucky in each nude toe beats a fragile
heart, counter-weight to arch, to
my tank up over my head. I might be a
criminal, revealing the weapon you
trained to erase—you might
feel how best not to harm one being—how to transpire as sibling-grass
under frog feet, yielding as the tenderest: Yes, I understand you
will go when & where you want,
save the whole town if you shoot me,
before we meet
& possibly with alarming speed—
I could be dangerous
may I prove easy as your leap—a soft patch,
as your ex-to-be
exit-spring.
Jane Springer was born in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee and raised in several small towns across the South. She earned a PhD at Florida State University. Her honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Associated Writing Programs’ AWP Intro Award, and the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry. Springer lives in upstate New York and teaches at Hamilton College.
