Saccades iii, Louie Van Patten

                                                       //

Passing through the aspen grove

the boy folds himself through slender limbs

that ease against his neck and shoulder

blade, until one presses more like finger-bone

and he goes still. It presses again. That sound

might be the mumbled laughter of a youngster

not right in the head, taking amusement

at an animal made to hurt or that murmur

might be the river within him, somehow risen

in his inner ear, forced through by heart

as he is mammal and more liquid than solid

composed. The shadows beside him seem

to breathe. What stirs within him is not

a current but a pooling chill that settles

just above the groin. The boughs shift slowly

in the still air and for a flickering moment

he cannot understand that what has separated

from the aspen now stands beside him

in the figure of a slender man. In the hollow

where his eyes should be is skin. Taut

skin across his mouth. Jaws strain to work

within. The boy’s stare is fixed as glass. 

His body stills as well. He will not move

again from where he stands. If the hinges

of his neck still worked he could look

down to see his body sheathed in bark

and whiskered roots splitting his shoes

to seek damp earth. He listens to the steps

of the slender man recede. Then nothing.

He rises, like an antler from the earth.

                                                       //

                                                    Q&A

Tell us about the conception of this poem.  

It's kind of a mash-up between riffing on Ovid's Metamorphoses and the slender man meme.


If not the forest, where else? 

Only the forest. It's always the forest. The city is still the forest. I hear Wall Street has wolves.


What or who has transformed your work?

 I'm a poet because I'm a reader. And as a teacher, I often re-read books dozens of times. That sort of reading feeds my work endlessly, as Homer and Ovid and Szymborska have plenty to say the ninth time around. The poems are smarter than we are.


What are you currently working on?

One about a man who, in his search for something authentic, begins eating stones.

                                                  //

Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, 32 Poems, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Best New Poets. He is the author of the chapbook The Imaginary City (OW! Arts, 2012). His first full-length collection, You Must Remember This, was the winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry; it will be published in the fall of 2014 by Milkweed Edition