BLACK RASPBERRIES AND THREE NEAR-RIPE WILD BLACKBERRIES, SIDE OF A FIELD, WILLIAMSTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS

by Lizzy Beck

I’m here on this bridge, maybe thirty feet above
the Green River, playing a game with a fish:

I choose a small one, and with my hand I smother it
in shadow. When the fish moves, I move.

It’s the same game a turkey vulture plays with me
near the observatory, dropping so close I can see

the naked pink of its head. I’m normally polite,
greeting by name the things I know

by name: hello, mullein, yarrow, felled oak tree
with nostril knot. Good day, brown cow, blackfly, frogs

in the bog, pasture heat and vetch. Salutations, mine own
hunger; and well met, black raspberries

and three near-ripe wild blackberries
at the side of the field.

I am wrong to torture the fish, down
in its alien element below the bridge. This trick

of moving my shadow against its shadow
is all I can get, drawn though I am

to them, drawn
as I am to your mind.

Lizzy Beck lives with her family in Western Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Salamander Magazine,Terrain.org and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Find her online atwww.lizzybeck.com.