Skill Sets
1
In the first cartoons
the mutability of forms
was a laugh riot:
bouncing biceps,
one foot growing huge
to stomp a cricket—
and staying that way.
The aye-aye’s
first finger.
2
It’s one thing to rate pains
on a number scale,
another to judge them
qualitatively—
aching, stinging
or burning?
Only we can do this
no matter how many
feed-back loops
they put into the machines.
3
Be specific:
include kinks and tics,
a good twinge
in the roots
when the brush is pulled
hard
through time’s
tangled mess.
Here’s the catch:
you can’t know
you’re in a costume
and also
be serious
Copyright © 2024 by Rae Armantrout. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 13, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Skill Sets’ may have begun when I was in a doctor’s office answering a question about my pain: Aching? Stinging? Burning? Or it may have started when I saw a photo of a creature called an aye-aye, and it made me think about the way bodies are distorted in classic cartoons. In either case, the subject of bodies runs throughout: what happens to them, and how they are evaluated.”
—Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California, in 1947, and was part of the first generation of Language poets on the West Coast. She is the author of Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2015 (Wesleyan University Press, 2016); Itself (Wesleyan University Press, 2015).