qarrtsiluni

by Monica Raymond

How does the tame
animal in the corral remember
the wilds from which she came?

Now is all order, champing
of given green, chafing
against content, peace, use.

Now the unseen flares up
in fence posts: once I was glory,
flame in the wilderness, now

I am house
bound, house broken. The ranges
close in—each fence once

was wood, and each grass seed
flew through the air, bare-
back, equestrian splendor

in every guardian. That we
to this place came, how caught
not issue any longer, but that

we meet, above us
sky and night, a geode split,
the fractured crystals of what once

was whole spill
down on us like salt. How then
wage wild or tame

when all in this fenced place
came to reckon, vanish, held
together briefly, as by some force?

Unlikely stars, grass, horse, unlikely
us, galloping our read
and leaping where numbered

stanzas place boundaries on
boundless. Or hold us in it, all
remembering

dark wind, expanse, we
leaping choose to live,
not one captor and the other captive.

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Monica Raymond is a poet, playwright, sometime essayist and photographer, general artist/teacher type, currently based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She’s published all of the above genres (except plays) in previous issues of qarrtsiluni.