Poetry by Misty Wycoff
A child fell to the ground,
stepping instead into the veil
of gravity,
his hand ripping through the portal
and wounding itself.
A small tear, a bit of blood, a pinprick,
a new experience
this wound.
Then, this little boy
held his whole arm up
as if broken, flat out in front of him,
bracing it below the elbow,
the scraped hand splayed ahead of him,
upward, needing someone to see
the innocence taken.
During the walk home
he kept the posture,
holding the arm like a prize,
like something now separate from himself,
closer now to his chest,
hand still open to the sky,
honored and anticipating the cure.
He was beginning to probe,
testing the many pathways
the routes to soften and palliate the damage,
finding a practice that will assuage
and bring ease to the many lacerations and losses
that life will put before him.
Like the God Aesclepius
who found that healing
was intrinsically bound
to the wound itself
his body knows that the small gash
the one that has pierced his veil of invincibility
is now the God itself,
the thing that will bring him closer to his core,
his real boy,
the one who lives beneath all the others.
Born to a world of high grass, crawdad creeks, and sharecropper orchard houses, Misty Wycoff’s early life was often spent in solitude, perched in the low branches of an old cypress tree, communing with the ranch dogs and wild animals, or barefoot, clamming the mudflats around Bodega Bay California. After nearly twenty years in Los Osos, she finds a deep resonance here to the land of her upbringing. Her first book High Rain came out in 2019, and she is currently editing her eighth book, Dwelling, which should be in local bookstores by early 2025. Contact through website is: bmistywycoff.com.