Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

LINDA BIERDS
The Breaking-Aways
—Samuel F. B. Morse
I remember the Town Hill elms, fluid
in the half-dark of evening, then the musk
of the creek I followed. A boy, alone, the riffle
of wings in underbrush. Then a woman's scream
there in the forest, far off to my left, long
and unwavering—but no, a field cat on a flat stone—
but no, larger, thick as a dog,
its sharp, unwavering scream. . .
The wire was bare, a horse-flank sheen,
and I wrapped it, yard by laborious yard,
in cotton—and once for the Hudson River, in tar-black
and pitch. My rooms were dense with pendulums,
magnets, the smoke-sting of solder.
"What hath God wrought!," I tapped, dashes and dots
ticking toward Baltimore, past the hedges
and cowbirds, the cottages, weathervanes, past
broken apples dark in the grasses.
And the sound? Like hail blown over a window.
Greetings. Stop. Regret. Stop. Strike and echo,
word and completion, an eyeblink.
I think of our lives as distinctions, quick
breaking-aways. From some vast, celestial streaming,
we are particles, the splendid particulars.
I was a boy. I remember elms, the paste
of the creek bed. I covered my ears with their cold lobes
to soften the screaming. And just before
backing away, released the lobes, then pressed again,
released, then again—and made from that
scream, from that wondrous outrush,
something apart from wonder.