From I

 

FREE RIDE

 

 

Did you see the satellite,

our planetary spy,

cast its vibes around the sphere?

 

And, crazed as a lost idea

wild to find its mind,

in no time flat it had me out there

 

reeling in a surreal sky.

 

My hat turned up in China.

 

 

 

CULTIVATION

 

 

Cultivating people can be arduous,

With results as uncertain as weather.

Try oysters, meerkats, turnips, mice.

My mouse field was a triumph of

Cultivation—pink noses poking

Through quilts of loam, scampering

In the furrows—until the falling

Dwarves (it was that time of year)

Began landing on my field. Fear for

Its harvest saw me down on hands

And knees muttering, “Not here,”

My nails clawed at tangles of fat

Dwarves crushing mouse families.

Then, unbelievably, it was over.

 

By morning every dwarf, maddened

By nibbling mice, had fled the field.

Now, as before, each day dozens

Of perfect mice leave for the city.

There, they have made many friends

Among computers, and with them

Are developing skills inconceivable

To their forebears. Already these

Cultivated mice and their computers

Penetrate guilty secrets. Soon they will

Prevail over the turmoil that defines

This darkest of ages. And they will

Find me, asleep in my cave.

 

 

 

TRAPEZE

 

 

It leans on me, this changing season,

breathless as these old photographs

 

under the lamp. White smiles will

smile forever; the tossed ball is fixed in

 

space and will not move, nor will

divers diving ever touch water.

 

Even the leaves outside my window

do not move. Gilded now, they pose:

 

picture perfect leaves posing for me—

or for whoever, looking up, tomorrow,

 

might happen to see their trapeze act:

the wave to the crowd, a flutter and

 

spins in rising air for the letting go;

then the vertiginous game with sudden

 

wind, yellow skirts lifted in spiraling

exuberance before the plummet.

 

 

 

THE ONLY THING

 

 

She went her way in shade, pared

her nails, wore a hat.  Once in a blue

moon she would close her eyes and see

 

again what a million years ago

had been, for her, the right

and wild thing, the only thing.

 

Her opaque meanwhiles, ticking

and tapping unreal hours at the

little screen, for what other

 

people wanted, were easy to

forget while her doorkey, as

accomplice let her into where,

 

redolent of nothing special,

perseverance spread its mossy carpet

and street noise poked the window.

 

 

 

Then one evening, when it came,

filtering through the spin and jar of one

evening out of thousands, scraping closer,

 

swarming in the stairs: a voice,

careless of pitch and pace but sweet

to the ear as if it weren’t a mighty

 

spill of lusty sound he made but a

threading of song into the world,

she caught at it from her room on third,

 

the very air a brimming chalice drunk

on his words—if words they were

—as she listened, standing between

 

bed and chair—then, eyes closed and

arms lifted, she swayed to the beat

of that feverish noise outside her

 

door and clearly saw, yet again, what

once had been for her the bright and

wild thing, the only thing.

 

 

From Coming to That by Dorothea Tanning. Copyright © 2011 by Dorothea Tanning. All rights reserved.