What happens when you run
away is you get to the nearest
pine before the freeway but
no further—you break a hand
on the barrier between last
year and this, missing only
the biggest points of basalt
obviously telling you the eclipse
is in Capricorn tonight and
your keys are in the trees back
yonder behind you where a
red or purple flower grows
inside the footprint from after
last night’s storm you made with
your own right heel, that’s what
holds the world together—
a ruddy thing rising in the woods
Cate Peebles is the author of Thicket (Lost Roads Press 2018), selected by Eric Baus and Andrea Rexillius for the 2017 Besmilr Brigham Award. She has published several chapbooks, including The Woodlands (Sixth Finch Books) and James (dancing girl press) and her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Tin House, jubilat, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere; new work is forthcoming in Tammy and American Poetry Review. She is a museum archivist at the Yale Center for British Art.
Photo: “Half Truths Only” by Bobbi Le’ Rae Valentin
Pine Hills Review 