Sacandaga, Placid, Desolation The first friend I made after we moved upstate was literally uncomfortable in his own skin: born with some disorder where his layers rubbed together until they blistered, Justin kept a sewing needle in his pocket even then, at age ten, to lance whatever part of him bubbled up. His god-fearing mother worried more about his left hand, forced him to write the notes at the family flower shop with his right. His dad exploded for a living. They kept the dynamite in the garage with their dump truck. I still remember how my cheek burned where it touched his after I hugged him on his four-wheeler while his bull chased us through the pasture. Years later, he shot me in the face with a paintball gun while I was wiping the fog from my mask. By then, we’d already stopped talking because he was always angry, and thought watersports were the only art. On Lake Sacandaga, Placid, Desolation, he flipped off the waves made by the boat that pulled him as another friend’s brother recorded, their high-speed camera capturing his tricks in the slowest motion—the torque of the tow rope, his board soaring above the sun as water marbled off his Mohawk, each moment’s friction forgotten as he hovered there, upside down in the air, the roar of the motor the only song until he dubbed one in later like he was a rock star, like he was anything but a lost boy, another hick Icarus trying to stick the landing, trying, like I did, to keep all his parts straight. Are you still? All these years later, I don’t know where or if you are, but I hope you fell, I hope you wrecked against your wake, and let go before the line you clung to dragged you under, before the water closed above you like a scab. There’s no escaping the maze of yourself. Only the dead get to fly.
Silk Ghost
I’ve never flown before,
but I know what it’s like
to be a lost boy. I grew up
caught in the rigging
of my own imagination.
My heart was a knot.
I wanted to be myself,
but didn’t know who that was.
You didn’t need to. Like a tree,
you changed with the seasons.
I don’t remember what color
your hair was when we met,
but it’s always fall
when I think of you now.
Is memory the bulldozer
you drew in the woods
while I pretended to read,
trying to find my words?
Or is it the soup made of stones
boiling on the stove?
Maybe it’s more like the circus
you left to join, a ghost
that haunts the yellowed grass
on the outskirts of town.
Even from underneath
its amber canvas, the big top seems
half-forgotten. The clowns
carry on like people
a dream smeared, accordion music
fading in and out.
The fire-eaters warm up
at the edge of the ring
while the lion-tamer rests his head
inside Jason’s mouth
for the thousandth time, thinking of lunch
with his estranged son,
and how far the crowd sounds
from inside this warm cave,
the coliseum bearing down
on his throat. No one owns swords
anymore, but the people here
still swallow them, and I think
I know why: we don’t know
the depths we have
until we do. The old dangers
retain their teeth. And how gently
the blade must be coaxed out.
And how limber the limbs
of the flyers must be
to defy gravity, the grave
history sends its history to.
That’s why the trapeze
always comes last in the show—
the aerialists know
how close a rope is
to a noose, and how the softest fabric
is also the strongest.
Hand over hand, you rise
above the sawdust
into your new name, old friend,
scaling the sheets like
a jailbird from the prison
of identity, weaving
and unweaving yourself
in silk, protean, perpetual,
wry as Penelope,
as Peter Pan
gliding above the stage
in drag. I’d always wanted
to be older, but the costumes
never fit, so I hid
behind the curtains, waiting
for my cue to come out.
You climbed them instead,
binding yourself in order
to escape. I’m imagining this
because I haven’t seen you
in years, and my love helps me
because she’s learned to fly herself.
You spin them like cocoons, she says,
remembering how safe it felt
to lie so high up
with all the other moths
about to grow into their wings.
You’re only free when
something holds you up.
You did. I’ll never forget.
From the Author: Robert Frost called North of Boston a “book of people.” I like this idea—that poems can be portraits and conversations, that a book can be like Facebook, a social media, but for the unsaid, the unsayable, the dead and gone. I wrote this pair in this spirit, but without, initially, thinking about them together. Eventually their kinship revealed itself: memory, metamorphosis, flight.
Benjamin Voigt grew up in upstate New York on a small farm and the internet. His poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in ZYZZYVA, Poetry Northwest, Sycamore Review, Salamander, and Beloit Poetry Journal. His writing about poetry has appeared in Kenyon Review, Pleaides, The Rumpus and on the Poetry Foundation’s website. He works at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and lives in Minneapolis.
