Man Saves Own Life
by Aaron Anstett
In the morning, before breakfast, I save my own life,
then walk around the house all day a hero.
Friends come by and ask how it feels.
I say it just happened. I couldn't help it.
They'd do the same in my shoes. I don't tell them how,
before I knew it, something raced down my fingers
and my feet. Something made me strong.
It crowded itself in my arms and my heart
and filled me up with as strange and kind a feeling
as I could remember, and suddenly I knew nothing
but I had to help that guy. It wasn't words. No voice
told me. It was more like light behind my eyes, weight
pressing in from every direction. High notes pierced me,
and it was clear what I had to do:
(from Sustenance, New Rivers Press, 1997)
Aaron Anstett’s collections are Sustenance (1998), No Accident (2005) selected by Philip Levine for the 2004 Backwaters Press Prize and winner of the Nebraska Book Award and the Falcones Poetry Prize), and Each Place the Body's (2007). His poems appear widely in journals and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He has long been active in the poetry communities of southern Colorado, where he lives with his children. He is poet laureate of Colorado Springs.
Aaron Anstett
1326 Lindenrose Grove, Colorado Springs, CO 80907
719-338-9772
