What Rough Beast | Poem for July 11, 2017

Carla Drysdale
Frontalier

You want your life back. Can almost smell it, like resin of rotting leaves, despite the freezing wind. You want to live alone in the timber-sided house across the border in La Bâtie. You know you can walk from here, to the hilly wooded road, next to the pebble-stippled bed of the thrashing river, which drowns out the highway’s drone. Tall, bare trees let the light through. You can walk from here. The Arabian mare grazes at the edge of the ravine, above the mill. Table is set. Wine poured. Motorway moan tightens in your stomach. You can’t stop the sound anymore than you can grow quills from your skin and flight feathers the color of jade sea. The plumes in your mind are pleats of stone. Winged Victory thunders from the sky, a hymn swooping hard against wind. Drapery plastered to powerful thighs. She can’t ever land because she has no eyes.

Carla Drysdale is the author of the poetry collections Little Venus (Tightrope Books, 2009) and Inheritance (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Spiraling, Public Pool, Cleaver Magazine, PRISM International, The Same, LIT, Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, Global City Review, and Literary Mama, among other journals, and in the anthology Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo. In May, 2014 she was awarded PRISM’s annual Earle Birney poetry prize for her poem, “Inheritance.” Born in London, Ontario, she lives with her husband and two sons in Ornex, France. To learn more, visit www.carladrysdale.com.

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