On the photo of a lone man back-packing across a stark cliff,
sharp white mountains staking blue sky, dropping straight
down into abyss, the advertisement reads “explore this,”
and I don’t get it–the snow-capped allure to be alone, left
on the altitude of death. Weren’t a lover’s brazen arms the edge
enough? Where were those lips, breathing a chorus on his neck,
a wind ensemble to his testicles? Was none of this intense
enough to convince him of a miracle? Safer, a frozen goddess?
Climbing her to the mythic edge, employing every human
skill to go the distance. It’s no banal temple where I want to risk
my life. I ask to burn in your flaming leaves, my mouth and hands
consumed, memorizing the membraned path, flesh mapping flesh
incantatory, blessed, your self, my self’s descent to the hinterlands’
hot white gates opening, light streaming in from the beginning.
Robin Carstensen has served as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review at Oklahoma State University where she earned her doctorate in English in Spring 2011. Her most recent work is published or forthcoming in Dos Passos Review, Naugatuck River Review, Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders, South Dakota Review, Tusculum Review, and Weber: The Contemporary West.
*Photo courtesy of strychnine.