I cannot climb to
heaven through the air. Do
bodies fly upward, I wondered, and do cows
really sit in our coffee?
We're
gathered together today to
witness the divorce of
metaphor and fact; our children wear their finest clothes and only
later weep in
front of their
mirrors.Bodies cannot so easily break as minds, but they shatter like
that same glass.
The child carries her image
like a doll down long
corridors lined with lockers. Someone kept breaking into mine; I
found the boy who used the marbled black binder with my father's
signature scrawled
inside. He said it was his, and at that moment it was. Fact is a
thief we pull back from. Fact
is Freddy Kreuger,
or Frederick Schultz, denying us the truth of our inventions. I
wondered how patients in surgery didn't wake up. The doctors keep an
eye on them, my mother said. It seems funny now.
2 comments:
Favorite line: "The child carries her image like a doll down long corridors lined with lockers." Freddy Kreuger might not want to stay in this poem; F. Schultz the antiquities guy who got convicted for stealing? Not sure if "Fact is a thief we pull back from" - a line I resist somewhat - will be enough to make the Schultz reference work.
Do cows sit in our coffee? That's delightful (no really, I have this image of tiny cows) and then I'm so saddened by the brave children who wait to cry. The mirrors/glass metaphor helps with the body/mind; the signature is really interesting because of course there can be fake signatures, or signatures added to frauds. I don't find "Fact is a thief we pull back from" a problem: we claim to like facts but we only like the ones we agree with. (As if you needed to agree with a fact for it to be true.) The surgery gets me.
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