Ascent—Liz Snell

"... but kicking is the only prayer I know."

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Liz Snell lives on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. She studied writing at the University of Victoria and is now studying psychology. She works with adults with disabilities and in her spare time gardens, hikes, knits, and makes awful puns.

Ascent

The old guides don’t come cheap these days. So done
with invocations, muses unionize
and strike, while Virgil’s left for Portland to
grow roses in the rain, ditched fire and love-
lorn tourists gawking over the abyss.
Here elements cancel themselves and I,
tossed from pride to despair, become
a yellow post-it note stuck halfway in
a Russian novel no one’s finishing.
What then? If I refuse to walk, just sit
right here and munch potato chips, I’ll still
have that long road after a thousand years
of stubbornness. Don’t kick against the goads—
but kicking is the only prayer I know.
Who wouldn’t hike a billion years to find
a crack of light, a fire that saves from fire
by burning all that’s flammable?
I’ll beg two minutes of eternity,
solid as a brick chucked through God’s pane
with a note scrawled, Notice me!
Grab me a candle stub, a flashlight short
on batteries, whatever’s left downstairs.
To show you I’m in earnest, I’ll accept
the crumbs of Paradise. Don’t mind me, grown
a little thick around the waist, the skin
a little loose across my hands, not young
but not yet old. The kind of soul he’d miss,
the driver of the Grey Town bus. I blend
with everything and yet remain alone.
Come in! they said. I asked them, Turn the key.
They may have tried, but something’s rusted fast
in me, in me. Soft grass blisters my feet.
Becoming real after the wooden nose,
the hide of velveteen, worn down by care
or wandering, requires the fairy touch.
And how real do I want to be? What self,
once fleshed, once touched, once seen, is ever free?

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Photo by Majid Gheidarlou on Unsplash