Leslie Harrison

WANDERING HEART PARABLE

& wild but also tethered leashed

& leaps out into lakes pale dawns into landscapes of pleasing mien

& into men

& the body says let it go 

& says we’re tired of the showoff tired of the sturm und drang

& stupid useless pump

& still nightly it slips back into the cavity

& a cavity is a hollowed-out place is the empty dark

& cave is to make the hollow go away the way mines collapse

& mine means to take away extract

& the heart is a skate on a string

& mine means to claim to cling grasp and to own

& the little girl pulls the skate along pretending it is alive

& obedient

& she slips the string into the hand of a man

& the skate bobs and skitters as if in the wake of a boat

& the man does not notice

& the heart is the least obedient thing on earth

& truant

& truant means beggar but also miserable

& mine means to salt the earth with sudden fire

& the man does not notice the girl does not notice her heart

& the string breaks

& the world becomes composed of skates careening everywhere

& they’re bloody clattering comets

& the man wonders what slight thing has changed

& the girl has wept and looked at last away

& the man stares unsettled at his empty hands

& the body wakes with the tail of a comet in its throat

LESLIE HARRISON is the author of two books of poetry. Her second, The Book of Endings (The University of Akron Press), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first, Displacement (Mariner), won the Bakeless Prize in poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Recent poems have been published or are forthcoming from Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Plume, and Waxwing. She lives and writes in Baltimore.