The Fiddleback

poem by Jamie Grefe

This is where I pull the blade from the skull of the man who came limping in a flail of limbs, drooling blood. This is where I shut the room’s magnetic door by the illuminated button in the panel on the wall. Here, I open lockers and chests to find money and more energy to prolong the hunt. This is my saw in the chest of a dead bug. Here I am swatting horse-flies by the river, rowing oars to the sound of the loons in the dusk. You are with me in the boat and we drift and we float: rippling trees held upside down, song upon call from the growth on the shore, or a log turning end to end on its way out to the sea as you did hand in water. I know you’ve been here by the webs of your juice smeared on the walls. I am collecting your juice to taste your mouth. These nights that I roam the corridors are endless. I never sleep. I never eat. I search. Without the thought of opening a door and finding you there, without the illusion of your skirted legs crossed at a desk, without the image of us rowing back home in the rain, would I ask for an arm to saw the hate out of my heart.

——–
Jamie Grefe