Sunday, April 28, 2019

Selfie and Other

Only when the real has slipped away
Can we polish the surface
With such cut and paste of ourselves
The iconic twilights beyond
Become things of the imagination
And the thing that this is about
A disappearing target.

After life comes awe, and then representation,
In The Natural World and All its Peoples
Museum the only dispute now
Is how much lighting.
Painting never recovered
From boiled hooves and halide;
How can our eyes remember to see?

When we reach out to show someone else
Who we are
It disappears,
The possibility
Of communication among the spheres.
The ones who went before never came back up
The hole they dug to find the others.

Tis’ only, they say, the vanity of the age,
How the soul is captured through the fisheye trap
The way the Hopi prophesied …
But who are we to say?
We still don’t know, after a thousand years,
Why every other summer they lay
Live rattlesnakes in their mouths.