Credo

Summer after my first year of college I was back
at camp where I knew all the songs, sang them
as I scrubbed toilets, took my shifts
bushwhacking. I filled out program plans
and even stayed out too late just like the other
counselors, but they were always staring.
What did I say? I'd say. Once, while lifting
a tent, a camper asked Which is the outside?
Suddenly, I saw the air, there in the orchard, shimmer
like atoms taking up sides. It was all coming together:
Plato's cave, Steven's jar in Tennessee. I felt this ringing
deep inside and I sang it out, and the other counselor,
the one holding the stakes, looked at me. But the weight
of the sun felt good on my skin, and I didn't stop singing.

Deborah Bacharach



Simple Machines

Fulcrum: the turtle under the world.
It lifts its leather head, gives me
the evil eye. Like I deserved that.

With a wedge and hammer, I whack
my skull seriously hard.
Yes, it shatters. If you pick up a shard

(do so, I urge you to do so)
you'll see my face in a fun house mirror,
my face one thousand times over.

In this shard, I've plucked a hair.
In this one, I'm imitating dismay.
Here, I've grown gills, blue gills.

I have an affinity for bridges that open
(pulley, inclined plane, even a wheel)
I feel them stretching my ribs, adding a little air.

I could use some air. I could fall in love
with the above mentioned turtle by which I mean
I could hold it in my arms, take its place.

Give me a lever long enough, etc.
I think the lobsters in my hair would look better
bright red, boiled, dead.

Lobsters are crawling up the statue of David.
I'm not being coy. I am shaking
a ukelele in my right fist, a Cubist screw in my left.

If nobody's going to talk about it or hoist you out,
you can keep lying on your cot at the Y
eating peanut butter out of plastic. I did.

At the Y, a woman died behind the cot screws.
They didn't find her body for a week. If it weren't enough,
the fragments of my skull are being crushed.

Wheels take out this shard: my tongue flicking
red lollipops (bad ones) and the shard of my face
that considers lotion a fair substitute for sleep.

So there's a ditch and a bank and the raw muck
of the bank is slipping into the ditch because of
(I forgot to mention it's such a given) the rain.

Ignore friction at your own peril.

Deborah Bacharach