Fata Morgana: Poems

Light Years

Light Years A god can’t do it, wants to touch all that mortality, but his hands slip through it, his fingers have no prints, no grip. He’s too symmetrical, has been too perfected to fit himself into the zigs and zags, warped planes and random crevices, snags and tangles, cracks and wrong notes and dropped stitches. Too true, wind whispers, it sighs right through him: the world all Daphne and him no kind of tree. What’s underneath things or inside them, cranks and cams and hammers, flywheels and toothed gears, whirs and clicks and grindings down, ticking out their working through of function, motion, form: you find them even microscopic, or too big to see unaided: expose the seams and joints for inspection, clear as never and never so close. You break open days to show what they’re made of, all flesh is sunlight, a machine plugged into a main sequence yellow dwarf star. Late afternoon flatters my skin with pattern, and then the setting sun undoes the picture. Dark, light, bright slip through my fingers, color distinctions fade with the day. 94 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 94 You walk ahead as if you know the way, full of purpose and intent on seeing what’s to be seen if you look hard enough, look deep enough, so certain the world is as you find it. (A pileated woodpecker taps on a dead scrub pine, I can’t find it even when you point it out.) I hang back with the noncommittal wind (the sound of wind), wandering away from glory. You call me back to the world of things, sometimes I don’t know why I should go there. 95 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 95 ...