Photograph of My Mother
What comment could you make about my childhood? You cannot know my mother’s
eyes and the way her hair feathered
in 1993. Gold bracelets and tanned skin. She is holding me
up to a camera and I am looking up to a sky. No one’s eyes are clearer than mine.
Like the dispersion of sunlight into colors of the spectrum,
the way cloudwater seeps through silken cheesecloth,
and what remains
is curd.
The physical generation of color: diffraction,
interference, fluorescence
The way birds create by taking externally and spiders
create from within.
Trick Shot
I want so badly to load myself
into a cannon. I never believed
a trick shot at a circus.
My body could have a small death
in a big way,
like a star in a distant galaxy.
No death can be so small
that is does not inspire some consideration
of the spiral dynamics of the solar system.
Rust is the blood of steel:
it meets its threshold much sooner than I.
Blood is the rust of my body:
red upon oxidization.
Sunlight, slit, prism.
Cannonball through the spectrum.
