If you look away, you can see
a pair of hands separate from their wrists
and know each part insists on equal truth.
You can watch ankles wave good-bye to their feet
and know neither is going away.
Knowledge, like love of anything
is the water line that slices away
the things below and sets them adrift
in their own lighted shadows.
Where are the caramel shoulders
and the back as smooth and dark as a beetle's?
Stars misdirect with their subtle angles.
They hide right out in the open
in the places they just left.
Sometimes when you think a woman
is upstairs reading, she's in the pool
pillowed deep in that old air-raft
dangling her arms in the water.
© R. Jeffrey Roberts
Refraction was first published in ECTOPLASMIC NECROPOLIS from Blood Pudding Press
About Me
- Jeff Roberts
- No one likes everything. We explore. We discover. We winnow. When young we are silly in our devotion to music. We pretend. We imitate our favorite artists. When Midnight Train to Georgia comes on the radio, I still turn into a Pip. Jimmy Buffet’s A Pirate Looks at Forty still touches me. I am similarly affected when I encounter good and great art and poetry. Joseph Cornell, Seamus Heaney, Louise Nevelson, Louise Gluck, Giorgio de Chirico, William Carpenter, Dali. When I see a Duchamp that nails it for me, I have the urge to windmill my arm like Pete Townshend. What if we let art and poetry sneak up on us like music? What if art came in 3 minute bursts and had a volume knob? What if?