Choose Your Own Adventure

Convict or not, come lunch you could snooze

in the shade, or break for the tree-line and the refuge

you know must be written somewhere behind it—

a woodcutter's cottage where you read old papers

and drink milk still warm from the goat.

If the bloodhounds break your wretched sleep,

no matter—open the book to another page, to a day

in your life as a wife gone fat to pad herself

against the Mister's alligator boots,

or work as a miner and spend your last page

trapped, the water rising like a tide of ink.

Open the book again and you are here,

in the spot you started, a hunter unable

to recognize as his own the tracks he follows.

You stand there, the world's best dilettante,

part journeyman and part Quixote, posed

safari-style on a wildebeest crumpled by a blind shot.

Or scratch that and begin once more, in medias res,

as a cowgirl more freckled than her appaloosa pony.

We'd skim the book in every combination

to find why she pauses here, at this desolate crossroads,

facing west to a barn full of shadows.