Pliny I & II
I stepped on a bird this morning.
It had fallen between
two parked cars. My boot-heel
made it make a quiet,
sobbing noise, not at all like birdsong. It was
brittle and soft at once, like
matchsticks inside
chewing gum. As a child in Rome, I dreamed someday
I would be Emerson’s “transparent
eyeball.” I tried
different ways to disappear: I wore a football helmet
everywhere. What I found out
was: you can’t
be a transparent eyeball in a football helmet.
I feel better in the dark. I
compare the dark
to chocolate: some rich, naughty substance covering
my body. That would be invisible—to
be dipped in chocolate.
That’s no football helmet. What if pain turned
the bird inside out, what if
its own scale were volcanic?
You’ve got to get yourself dirty to imagine it.
You’ve got to get down
on all fours and bark.
____________
I became a tiny eye to see into the eye of a sparrow,
a cricket’s eye, a baby’s
eye; when I looked
at the night sky I made my eye as big as history, for
the night sky is a kaleidescope
of past-times,
as noted astronomer Carl Sagan said. I watched TV and
made my eye a TV: lidless, rash
gazer at whatever happens,
casting shadows of what happens for the neighbors,
whose eyes are the size of windows,
my windows, and sharpen
their sight to voluptuous desire, voyeur voyeur
pants on fire. Anything half-seen
becomes what’s on,
becomes the neighbors’ newscast, lotto drawing, rerun.
How do you know a child had died, except by watching
trays of casseroles brought in, the old sit down,
peoples’ bodies doing as bodies will against the wall?
—Dan Chiasson
Dan Chiasson
is the author of two books of poetry, The Afterlife of Objects
and the forthcoming Natural History.
Originally published in the September/October 2005
issue of Boston Review
|
home