Poetry for Escalieta I

Escalieta (2005)

By Mary Julie Klimenko

I am from the place where metal cable, pulled taut

across a cavernous hole in the earth, sometimes snaps

and breaks, slashing limbs and putting the upright to sleep.

You find something about that snap of steel whipping into

a wild and loose S curve that reminds you of kissing.

I am what men quarry in silence, hoping they live to find the road home.

I am what you long for, spun into the fabric of your dream as dangerous

as cutting marble from mountainsides.  I am faceted and textured by nature.

You did not make me this way.  Seized by desire

you determined to change me.  Even after you imposed your will

Using every tool you owned to alter me, I still resembled myself.

So you tried kindness, rubbing me smooth for days on end

until I thought I might disappear into the round shoulder of boredom.

You grew restless and wild as I ignored your tender advances.

You stopped polishing, going back to your old ways,

Chisel and hammer.  Nothing transformed me in any significant way.

Here in the silence of granite hallways my mute and elegant presence

testifies to the arrogance of your hands, how they discovered raw material

the color of pale roses.  Cut from the mountain by men

who cannot let what is beautiful remain beautiful without imposing themselves,

destroying what took thousands of years and density of bones to create.

Now you tell everyone you created me.  You tell them you made me.

When we both know I could not have been made more perfect

than the moment before you touched me, when you wanted to touch me.

You found the smoothness of the curve of my spine

juxtaposed with the desperation in my eyes, aphrodisiac.  You did

not want me to go away.  Your hands did not stop seeking, feeling my surface,

my skin.  I have been watching you for as long as it has taken you to touch me

and then more time than that.  I do not have to touch you nor do I move towards you.

You cry out my name and it echoes a hundred, more than a hundred times

in the endless night made longer by the light of each star whispering my name

as pure light.  Hear it?  Not Greek or a variation of a word that means a broken

piece of clay.  My name is a language you invented, beginning with touch

ending somewhere far away where you are dreaming yourself

into my heart, a man, cry to my echo, need to my offering, flesh to my shadow.

I love you deeply and completely no matter how many times you turn me to stone.