As a Flock of Robins

Perhaps as a flock of robins emerges from the golden leaves of the autumn vineyard, their airborne bodies fleck the sky. Dark at a distance, ashen forms follow my eyes dis- and re- assembling.

Maybe from below as I gaze up straight the flock washes overhead, chilly air coming to life with the electric wind of wings. Is it not the same with us?  I marvel at the brilliant red of their breasts streaking by in countless similarity.

Event Horizon

Perhaps the grandfather is frail and old with hair so white it might be made of snow or whipped cream. He speaks a mixture of cloud and wind and tells stories that all end the same, with him sitting on the rim of a very, very deep pit that emits a gravitational pull so great as to make his escape impossible.

Maybe from the children’s point of view, the grandfather is always waiting for something to happen. Some days he is waiting at the window for a new pizza parlor to open across the street, other days at the door for someone to come back from the store with a gallon of milk. Whenever the grandfather brushes his teeth, cooks a grilled cheese, or tells a story he does it in a half-hearted way, as if to show this small action is only a diversion from the main business of waiting. A hole in the ground on earth is only a hole because of gravity, he explains to the children. But beware. It's also a thing you can easily fall into.

Strange Matter

Perhaps when you enter the home everything is there – furniture, clothes, laptop, piles of paper, coffee cups – but it has all been inverted so the that the floor is the ceiling and the home is upside down. You enter the home through a small doorway called The Title.  At first glance, the home reads like an M.C. Escher-esque installation of words, with stanzas of phrases forming staircases that don’t actually connect. On the second floor of the home there’s a cozy balcony with a couch and Scottish blankets, which appears to be an ideal place to view the home in its entirety. Then you realize that you’ve been tricked. What you imagine you see below the balcony is just a reflection of what’s above.

Maybe you will find the circularity of the home surprising. Since much of the navigation of it is in the belief of progress – that the point left behind when venturing forward is fixed – a feeling of having committed an error when moving through the home is virtually guaranteed by the fact that all sources of natural light have been concealed by angled partitions and that the route through the rooms is almost completely dark. As a visitor, you will only ever know where you are at in the home once you have arrived. Yet for all its strangeness, this dark, inverted home is amazingly stable. Above and behind you a fire is blazing at a distance, and at the end of the tour when a gift is presented you will be ecstatic when given dirt; less so when presented with flowers.

Untitled

Perhaps poets are liars obsessed with cereal. Take for instance, Fruit Loops. No bitter edges to disturb the sweet, sugary curves. All sharp corners of love replaced with nonexistent simplicity and colorful nuance.

Maybe as poets create something parallel to what they know there is always some progress, even when things are at their worst, because at least they don’t have to do over again all the negative things they’ve already done. Is it their point to show us how it is possible to do something by undoing it? As everything is disappearing more than once, once more, sometimes one has to dare to give the final brushstroke that makes everything one has done up to a certain point disappear.  Some like to imagine a cosmic mother watching over us from the night sky the poet writes as she places six quarters in the vending machine and a can of root beer tumbles out like a body falling from the stars.