SO
MANY CLOTHES ON
As I was lacing my boots, I said to my dog, How come in the winter, I have
to put so many clothes on and you don’t?
I said, When a thing is true in a way, the way might
be more interesting than the truth-- don’t you think?
For instance, it might be true in the
way that a pun is. Or Jesus Christ. Or Rene Descartes.
Like a pun, or a parable, or a “math
fact” . . . . When I’m in the woods, I don’t stand in the middle of the path to pee, I find
a tree.
Could it be true that as many ways exist for things to be similar as for things to differ? You and I, for example. Both such good dogs.
(first published in Mudfish)
SNAP
Poor mousie living for months
on toilet paper from the linen closet
one day finds bagels and English muffins in a kitchen cupboard
thinks she’s died and gone
to heaven
yep (published
in Three-season Views)
THINGS THAT FLY OVER
Birds: humming. Swift. Blue.
Black. Sea- bound gulls. From land- fills. Or vice versa. Goose. Duck. Not: loon, cormorant (paddle past), heron (strut past), osprey (over- fly water, seek fish). Not: fish.
Bats. Rare planes.
(Sea planes fly fast over water, seek what?) And satellites. Neighbor buys cell- phone size black
box for boat that seeks satellites one two three, tells latitude, longitude, precise elevation of boat,
says, “Three hundred twenty-one feet below sea level.”
I have nothing to hide. Come find me. Please. If you want, you can. I’m right where certain things fly over, certain don’t.
(first published in Passager)
HORUS NON NUMERO NISI
SERENAS
Most sundials are flat discs with a prong sticking out, a gnomon, a shadow-caster at
any given moment preventing that moment from seeing the sun.
Most suns are spherical gaseous flame-storms
in whose light the sundial is obliged to teach by darkness, and whose heat prevents close argument.
Most arguments, like most sundials, stick up for themselves. Otherwise, where would they be? Most are circular:
hop in anytime. Hop in anywhere.
(first published in Poetry Northwest)
“BLUE
SOFA”
Imagine that you entered the room from some other galaxy, from some metallic planet
where such objects don’t exist, not even the materials, not even the concept. That therefore you’d
never sat down in anything remotely like it, and sunk down into it, felt it receive you sighing with pleasure, that you’d never smelled that waxy deep-sweat smell of leather--that you then saw the piece here and presto, as if you’d received the full variety of experience from the one sense of seeing, all at once, for the first
time. Except that you wouldn’t. Realistically, your own experience couldn’t have prepared you.
It’s more likely you’d think of the piece in some other way-- something to eat, perhaps. Suggesting that the metallic-planet scenario is just a failed attempt to express how the piece’s sheer presence could
expand into multiple dimensions, this piece which can be what it’s not, as you can’t. You’re
not from some other galaxy and neither am I, as I imagine us, and we can’t either of us experience anything, a made-up painting of a blue leather sofa, for instance, or any element of that, for the first time except once.
Even if we sneak up on it. But almost. Almost.
----------------------------
(Copyright
© 2004 Bob Brooks)
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