Sway
And then there was the time I'd had a couple of drinks at home
and went out wandering in the woods near my house
in a light snowfall and found an illegal deer stand high up in a tree
and being seized with a sudden sense of outrage
I ran home and got a sledgehammer from my shed
and went back and climbed up the tree despite my fear of heights
and standing in the crotch of the tree
and trying not to look down I pounded away at the wooden planks,
at first ineffectually but with escalating frustration and stupid fury
until they finally succumbed and one by one broke loose and fell
away from the tree. At one point in my frenzied onslaught
I had to stop and rest for some moments,
looking out breathing hard sweating and swaying
over the forest floor and its carpet of leave
and I felt the whole world stop for a moment
as I waited to find my balance again
and I thought I could die doing this
and what a stupid way to die that would be
but I didn't really care and I resumed whacking away
with the sledge until all the parts of the deer stand
had been knocked down and then I climbed down shakily
and dragged all the wooden planks home and sometime later I burned
them in my wood stove and they gave off sparks
as they burned. And there was nothing more of it
except that afterward I would sometimes wonder why
I had done it and whether others I met had ever stood,
leaning out into space, in the thrall of some strange passion,
and swaying.
E. J. Evans is the author of Ghost Houses (Clare Songbirds), Conversations with the Horizon (Box Turtle Press), and the chapbook First Snow Coming (Kattywompus Press). He has poetry forthcoming in Innisfree Poetry Journal, I-70 Review, and Worcester Review. He has lived in California and in Florida and currently lives in central New York.
Amethyst Review 