Voluntary Servitude, Title Poem and Book Review

Voluntary Servitude
Mark Wunderlich
Dec 15, 08 · edit
Katie Salter's review
I love Mark Wunderlich! I had the pleasure of hearing him read a few years ago, and I find myself greatly influenced by his ghostly pastoral works. I treasure my signed copy which I have read over and over. The following is, of course, the title poem from the book:
VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE
In a valley in Wisconsin there is a graveyard where the graves are flooded by spring.
You say, Don’t wreck me, and I say I won’t, but how can I know that?
To see a man in shackles, how you feel about that, depends on whether the servitude is voluntary
The bodies are intact in their gloves, soaked in a bath of ice. Hair a net around them.
Music does not console me. Words in books rise up and scatter.
A friend told me of a snake that came into her room one night.
The house was in Pennsylvania. She lived there alone.
In the dark she could hear it—dry, slipping onto boards like a stocking rolled from a leg.
It retreated when she turned on a light. There was a dark hole at the floor.
Residents disagree about the cemetery.
Some think to say the bodies are intact is wrong.
To suggest that there is anything abnormal is unfit thinking.
I have a new story to tell you.
In it, there is a girl. It’s a story a friend once told me.
Some forms of servitude are voluntary. Some shackles too—
Some you can remove. But this story—
you start in the middle, in the thick and marrow of it.
I think you’ll like it. Let me tell it to you.
Lying side by side. In the dark.