Rachel Webster

A Narrative

Sometimes we are captured by ladders,

life broken up into rungs.

Once, I rung out

whole against another’s skin.

But I felt unworthy, thought I needed more

of a story.  I left, then

was shadowed by another, her name

woke before me mornings in his bed.

I know that cold: dislocated

caps and bolts sliding over my belly,

falling into my hair’s brown drowse.

Later, I became shadow to others:

darker shard in her responsive tongue,

riverweed slapped across her thigh.

You, who that was, know, that wasn’t me,

just some light I blocked

unwittingly.  By then, my body,

it may as well have been imaginary.

In one version of the story,

she comes back for her shadow.

In another, she carries it for years

like a folding knife.

In the oddest and most difficult to recount

she starts, mid-clutch—the rung’s

a tunnel and what

ladder?  This is

the sporing field,

common, wild.

I

Rachel Webster won an Academy of American Poets Young Poets Prize in 1997.  Her poems have recently appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Redivider and Blackbird.  She teaches poetry at Northwestern University and edits UniVerse, the online anthology of international poetry located at www.universeofpoetry.org.