Bent Orbit
I wind my way across a black donut hole and space that clunks. Once I saw on a stage, as if at the bottom of a mineshaft, the precise footwork of some mechanical ballet. It was like looking into the brain of a cuckoo clock and it carried some part of me away forever. No one knows when they first see a thing, how long its after image will last. Proust could stare at the symptom of a face for years, while Frank O'Hara, like anyone with a job, was always looking at his watch. My favorite way of remembering is to forget. Please start the record of the sea over again. Call up a shadow below the pendulum of a gull's wing. In a city of eight million sundials, nobody has any idea how long a minute really is.
Credit
From Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems by Elaine Equi. Copyright © 2007 by Elaine Equi. Published by Coffee House Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
Date Published
01/01/2007