uncaged animal
Mark Vogel
Sometimes it seems that if someone saw inside her,
they’d lock her away in a tower for her own safety.
But we are lovers and do not accept captivity,
so she wanders free, crafting with her convoluted
logic, her literary plots, one scene at a time.
All of it more real than the actual world.
Look: so gentle the high school girl’s passion
for danger as she seduces her man. The stall on
details, the warm hand rising, searching.
Look: the eyes locked in context—both acting
in the drama and watching the rolling tumble.
Both loving the swirl and calmly recording
the emotions within. As the pen moves
she delights in her wild freedom, making
no distinction between work and pleasure, and
her fictional killing and breathing, for she is
determined to have it all and go to the end of the road.
Because she, the predator writer, keeps me close,
I feel the stories as they emerge—like how now
she is the woman screaming in the rain, the pelting pain
impossible to ignore. How she smiled last spring
when the dystopian trauma glared with its monster face.
How cold she can be like a cat observing from the window,
twitching in anticipation as the sparrow approaches.
Until we both become the paw aching to move.
We live often enough in isolated boxes, unable
to talk on foggy days when the writer is fierce
and the walls are thin. Today on this bed I listen
and hear (so close), a sound (maybe imagined)
like a sick calf, or a self-conscious student trying
to speak. Though I am still cocooned in our sensuous
swamp, I see her new creation move as she maps
the path. Amazing, the mammoth space her work
takes, as we move in the thunderstorm clouds--
almost as if I don’t yet exist.
Mark Vogel
Sometimes it seems that if someone saw inside her,
they’d lock her away in a tower for her own safety.
But we are lovers and do not accept captivity,
so she wanders free, crafting with her convoluted
logic, her literary plots, one scene at a time.
All of it more real than the actual world.
Look: so gentle the high school girl’s passion
for danger as she seduces her man. The stall on
details, the warm hand rising, searching.
Look: the eyes locked in context—both acting
in the drama and watching the rolling tumble.
Both loving the swirl and calmly recording
the emotions within. As the pen moves
she delights in her wild freedom, making
no distinction between work and pleasure, and
her fictional killing and breathing, for she is
determined to have it all and go to the end of the road.
Because she, the predator writer, keeps me close,
I feel the stories as they emerge—like how now
she is the woman screaming in the rain, the pelting pain
impossible to ignore. How she smiled last spring
when the dystopian trauma glared with its monster face.
How cold she can be like a cat observing from the window,
twitching in anticipation as the sparrow approaches.
Until we both become the paw aching to move.
We live often enough in isolated boxes, unable
to talk on foggy days when the writer is fierce
and the walls are thin. Today on this bed I listen
and hear (so close), a sound (maybe imagined)
like a sick calf, or a self-conscious student trying
to speak. Though I am still cocooned in our sensuous
swamp, I see her new creation move as she maps
the path. Amazing, the mammoth space her work
takes, as we move in the thunderstorm clouds--
almost as if I don’t yet exist.