Down the path between the apples through the maple grove of suicides then left at the old wall along the wire fence to the brook- bank where narcissus noses into skunk cabbage and hepatica: Call me Apollo, crashing in the underbrush with my arrows, my bow saw and clippers out for your flash of white tail and alert to hack me a path to your lair, to your cult’s den, crisscrossing the water with Phoebe again and again as it elbows below us and runs for the creek racks strongest in springtime when everything’s liquid, tightroping over the rocks in the plashing braid, hot on your sharp scent and battling the mayflies the black flies horseflies mosquitoes there under the raspberry brambles and getting no nearer . . . Or am I fleeing your coiling uncoiling tentacular embrace battered and scarred, am I seeing your fabled face in the oily pools, are these fern hairs sprouting at your knuckles branchbones, little leaves halving our limbs with leaves—are they yours or mine? Your bloodhounds bay at the copper creek, your velvet cape’s aloft in the chiaroscuro breeze, you’re near, nearer, hieing, heying, I’m falling, failing, gashed, gutted, kneed-up, muddy and galled—call me Actaeon....
From North Street and Other Poems by Jonathan Galassi (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). Reprinted with the kind permission of the author.
