Literary Criticism
You Want Your Truths Told of You by E. Travis Lane
You want your truths told of you—
those wavery lines!
Each pencil mark's a fiddlehead
unfolding to an island of wild fern,
of alders, grass, of willow trees,
of sharp dams in the silty sand
where a barefoot girl stands
to watch a cattle barge
rock, like a cradle in the wind.
She can not tell them where she stands,
her nude toes turning blue as clams
in the murky water where it chafes
the green facts into islands—
shoals, reefs, whirlpools, naked trees
scoured by the ice.
Her plain nouns bell their inner folds
like a coiled spring uncoiling
or like eggs
that tremble in her hand and beat
their shells with razor bills and spread
out wings.
Their shadows cast on the millstream float
on spinning water for all time,
never entirely truthful.
