Fortress

by David Capps

Fortress

I awaken in the ravine. I walk down into the long fortress of the things I’ve said, where all words have the same meaning. Soon the woodsman comes, having just strolled through his forest, a swirling glass of familiar trees, sunsets and oxbows. I know him as the woodsman but he carries the sign of Artemis. When he sees the marble pillars of my fortress he loads his crossbow. Don’t be afraid, I yell down to him, and invite him to sit with me by the hearth. As I begin my story, I can tell already he knows it by heart. He listens the way a child would to his favorite bedtime story, except my story is not about the past, or the future, or some distant land. My whole story concerns the present moment. I tell him how I have wished for a divinity to assure me that everything is ok. Not that I expect a giant hug or anything, but that there should be some source of constancy in life. He nods and seems to sympathize, even while he tells me that mine is a forlorn wish, saying that if such a divinity did so assure me, I would not trust his word since everything is not ok. What I really wished for is such a divinity to make me trust him, to be more powerless than I already am under the guise of wishing for protection. After the conversation finishes he turns to me, as we had somehow forgotten to introduce ourselves, but also because it is hard to know anyone you have never looked squarely in the face. As I lean in I can see the bristling hare he had caught that morning, its ears sticking out from his cloth sack, the reddish curls of his matted beard, the first hints of what I have come to regard as an apology beginning to form on his lips before his crossbow goes off. I awaken in the ravine.

David Capps is a philosophy professor at Western Connecticut State University. He is the author of three chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), and Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020). He lives in New Haven, CT.