Dream VII
by Amanda Gunn
First poet of our family, you have
taken your clothes off in
the street like Francis.
And our elder brother, freshly
made patriarch,
he is trying with all his might not
to imprison you but
to clothe you.
Look how he is extending open
his finest coat. Look how
you are shivering. If you
reach out your finger
and touch the fabric,
how will it feel to you?
Warm, silk-soft. Stiff-stifling.
You refuse,
reaching instead toward a poverty
you must admit you
have always romanced.
Overland, dusty, itinerant. No anchor
weighing you down
in the deeper waters.
There is freedom there in the naked.
No ring of marriage.
And you may tend only to the duties
that call you.
You will circle the neighborhood on foot.
You will save children as fragile as
little animals.
You may repair the church of beings
you have never seen.
You take up the sharpest tool you can find,
though, when you look down, it is only
your bare hand,
and all that you mastered in your younger days.
Your right cross.
Your roundhouse kick.
Your shoulder dipping backward
with the elusion of a bullfighter.
And, oh, your broken heart,
your fleet, fleet run.
Amanda Gunn is a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard where she writes on Gwendolyn Brooks. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is the recipient of The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. Gunn’s work has appeared in POETRY, Gulf Coast, and Narrative. Her debut collection, Things I Didn’t Do With This Body, was published by Copper Canyon Press.