The Maynard
Spring 2018

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Tests for Walking

Days, days, and days I go walking.

I go walking to dispense with formalities.

I give the built environment scale. I test its codes,

             its promise not to crush me.


I go walking to test the limits of our mutual distance;

             to remember or forget you, I can’t be sure.


I go walking. I give rainfall a moving target;

             winter afternoons a reason to throw shade.


Dear sunlight, subtract my impact from my invisibility—

             I strike the pose of a human walking in a city.


I go walking. I test unyielding concrete

             against steadfast rain forest—

The trees drink their meed

             in the daily outpouring of unkindness.

City workers cut down trees I mourn continually

             for security in case of wind storms—

             Their living canopies once screened my eyes

             from alarmed orange glare at night,

             bland beige glare on waking.


Dear sunlight, subtract property the city insures

             from precarity it refuses to see.


I go walking. I test my femur’s range of motion

             in the socket of my rakishly tilted pelvis.

I go walking to feel my arms and legs

             describe or evade the city limits, I can’t be sure.


I go walking as if I never left other cities

             older, warmer, crooked-streeted, longer-memoried cities,

             the nests of my languages, every signpost marking my belonging

             in the face of despots intent on tearing them down.


I go walking. In this city of perpetual theft, perpetual amnesia

             I test neither walls for buried treasure nor boats for seaworthiness

             but I test God’s definition of human in the Quran—

             as one who forgets, one made for forgetting.

             I’m either looking for Khidr or becoming Khidr, I can’t be sure.


Cities make us hold the unsayable in our bodies

I go walking to beg the city to be different for me,

to unwrite unsayability from my throat.


I go walking to beg the city to crack open for me

             its escape routes, its stores of solace, its sugar and rainbows,

             to claim me this one time, for the thousandth time.


I go walking to beg the city for place to write this,

             to retrace or erase the ways I meant to write this, I can’t be sure.


I go walking the way I would most like

             to give and receive love—frankly, directly.


I go walking against all evidence

             that my bones and I might still, as a body, find love—

             a force that gathers me to itself

             the way angels are said

             to have wrestled or crushed men,

             half-disbelieving, into prophethood.


Dear sunlight, subtract the acute angle of my mortality

             from the oblique of your infinity.


I go walking to test the limits of our mutual distance—

             I’m a woman gripped in time’s tightening vise.

I go walking to test the strength of my composed face—

             How well I smooth its disarray after every grief!


And I relive—what madness!—that I memorize,

             I rehearse, as if to anticipate—

             the surprise of meeting yours—

How quickly fear overrules desire on a face like yours!


Dear sunlight, subtract my thralldom to fiction

             from my vaunted adherence to fact.


I go walking. I only want the impossible—

             to read an epic in your careless few words

             to swim across salt water cupped in your palms

             to sleep a thousand nights on the bed of your celestial body.


I go walking to test the limits of my disbelief that I can be here

             until I can be here

             until I can flee here.