[Wanting to be a servant of no one and wanting to compel service from no one]
Wanting to be a servant of no one and wanting to compel service from
no one, wanting to be uncondescendingly mutual but taught as a child
to serve or compel service, that one is either servant or master, I came
to God, who is both servant and master, looking for both a master and
a servant. And, having prostrated myself before Them, I found that
my ass was still on the floor looking up at someone, and it was good for
a time, because it was familiar, but soon you feel it in your back, your
neck, all that looking up. All that bowing. People aren’t meant to live
on all fours, aren’t meant to cower like a dog. But I did cower. I did live
on all fours, faking my way through dogdom. And God said it was good,
but I was like, really? This is what you want for me? Why would a
benevolent God think of Their Function so dichotomously? They
meant for me to travel the antipodes like a polar explorer and I did,
but like a polar explorer, what I found was mostly uninhabitable.
Forked tongue of cold reaching in past my clothes toward me, was our
God. Our forked God, a tongue, a road, a blow lightning strikes you
that brings you to your knees. By now, it is easy to put a number of
things in a small pack and head for that road. Head for that bolt of
lightning. Bottles of water, hard food, the terrible bread that us of the
ancient hands always makes. Easy to put them in a pack in the night, as
we sleep in the other room, thinking of that road, our God. Easy to pull
one, two, three extra shirts off the line and layer them to keep warm,
easy to walk very quietly past the dreaming dog, who barks no matter
what you do at night. His feet articulate as he conjures, and I think, is
that what’s happening in his brain when he runs? Running a series of
hinges in the legs going off again and again, a series of synaptic binaries
creating a path down a nerve that seems inevitable. It is easy for this
path of binaries to open the gate very slowly, to prevent it from crying
out. Easier and easier, each step, to see this ill-lit road, its country
trees, to imagine the town it ends in.
[Dreaming of being singular]
Dreaming of being singular, you
tried to keep yourself apart,
a person watching from
an upstairs room
the activity of the neighbors
in their yard below.
Turning off all human—or,
any sign of human—,
makes you a voyeurish
letch, looking in on someone’s
saggy boobs and crumpled
bed sheets. Most windows
are made for one-directional
viewing, are not intended
to make clear a path for
people on the outside.
Which makes them perfect
for me. I mean you.
I have liked to imagine myself
behind a two-way mirror,
observing but not observed.
You have to have
some material moderating
the experience to do this.
Polonius behind his curtain.
Which is why I speak to you
like this, here. The line,
the one between you and me,
a little broken.
KATIE BERTA has poems appearing or forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Bennington Review, among other magazines. She has received residencies from Millay Arts and The Hambidge Center, fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and an Iowa Review Award. She is the managing editor of The Iowa Review.