I Will Away
With your promises tucked
like a dry newspaper
under my safe arm.
While the televisions play
their favorite ode to cops and robbers
and the sodium lights sing
I-am-orange all over town.
I will away like the BB-gunned
bird, the .22ed squirrel:
limping, half-wrecked, and visibly
alive. I will away the midnight
jogger, passing shadowed rooms
of fuchsia and cold furnaces,
where unbidden ears count
the ticking of water heaters
against the uncertain clock
of someone else’s wood smoke,
the shoveling of someone else’s snow.
I will away ivy, not the vine,
dead dog, not the frozen
tennis ball in his mouth;
I will away a light bulb crushed
without a handkerchief and the dull
glass swept from your house.
–Keetje Kuipers
Keetje Kuipers was the 2007 Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published by BOA Editions. Keetje is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and divides her time between San Francisco and Montana, where she lives with her dog, Bishop.
