The Poem is a Ladder
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- The Poem is a Ladder
for Maya
Say the poem is a ladderyou have to construct as you climb it,scrapped boards nailedinto the heart of the tree.Say you take each stepin lovebut it’s possiblethat love is not enough.Or here, take this rope,tie some knots, put your foot there.If there is no rope, use anythingelse, tears, fear, your past,knot them up, climb.Each next place slips a littlebeyond where you were, each rungjust appearing where your hand is,a miracle in retrospectthat hangs you like a gullon circumpolar air.Go ahead and look downand look up, but mainly lookacross the landscape unravelingits compass points under forests and cities.What you see is realand what is real changesand this wind will always be in your face. [End Page 238]
Karen Donovan’s first collection of poems, Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), won the Juniper Prize. Her new collection, Your Enzymes Are Calling the Ancients, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books and is forthcoming in 2016. Her poems have appeared most recently in Blackbird, Conjunctions, and Mudlark. She works as a writer and graphic designer in Providence. donovan.rumble@gmail.com
