3 Worlds
3 Worlds
by Dan Raphael
swimming in the supermarket, shopping cart fish traps,
raccoon working the register, which tree has the cold beer inside it.
when I smell lunch its 2 steps away, toasting on the currents it floats on,
my hand makes the holding a glass mudra and i’m no longer thirsty
*****
as if this meadow is the top of my brain with the skull gone—
sunshine, streams, burrows, seasonal cogitation,
where we picnic, here I cooked, there I got 3 business cards,
the sky as thin & grey as my hair
*****
as the cloth is pulled from our cage we have so much to sing about:
today we’ll escape, wings immediately doubling in size,
what we’ve watched for so long will soon be breakfast
the rumors the wind pressed against the glass will come true
This is extremely compelling and reveals itself after two or three readings. Suddenly I am hungry, but I don’t have any desire to raid my fridge or go out to a restaurant… I want to strip naked and hunt some small game with my hands.
Bravo to this piece. So-a-nice-a.
Compelling, but ironic. The three worlds–a supermarket, a meadow, a birdcage–all leave something to be desired: the market viewed as predatory nature, in which the poet might well be consumed and loses his thirst for mere consumption; the meadow a place whose potential for true opening up turns into a travesty of a picnic, business cards, and a vacuous sense of aging; the birdcage outlooking a world of fantasized possibility barred as usual by glass. I’d like to get free and range around too, but the poem keeps me within civilized bounds. To me, it’s both amusing and appalling.