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Some nights the lake, through various displacements and transformations,
bypasses boat ramp and railing, street, fence and wall, and tries on the
rooms of my house. This accounts for my fleeting and often contradictory
notions of how to live. Like water the wisdom says. And sometimes indeed
I feel like I've been poured into position, or am emptied from a room.
And then other times the dense mass is enough to bind my feet to the bed.
One night, while feeling the pull of the lake, a raccoon had climbed out
on the roof, and its face so suddenly present at the bathroom window gave
me a jump as my piss hit the toilet cover like a shot. Still, the animal
looked on. Then the strange distance between us gave way to a gravitating
curiosity, an exchange along a mammalian line. Then diminishment and withdrawal,
the line that could not be crossed, the lake receding, and each of us returning
to our own routines.
Copyright 2001, Stephen Campiglio
Stephen Campiglio's poem (which first appeared in The Raw Seed Review [1999]) is from a chapbook of prose poems entitled "The Procession," a work-in-progress that is nearly completed. He has also finished a chapbook of ekphrastic poems on the Belgian surrealist, Rene Magritte. His work has recently appeared in Urban Spaghetti, Architrave, Ekphrasis, and 96 Inc, among others. He lives and works in Worcester, MA.
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