The geese cross the highway—five silent film comedians—while snow
falls on their slate-gray backs. I’m in seclusion. My parents are at
a remove, like dolls placed in doll-shaped holes, but when you open
the box there are only cardboard edges giving shape to nothing but air.
The narrator signs a lease. He lives in a haze of monofilament
and insurance forms he ignores. Horses drift through the mist
of his backyard, one ridden by a woman wearing a wetsuit, or maybe
cows from a local farm have escaped, some brainwave-bending ordinary
light in evidence, mist under a late fall rainbow, a lady with her gender
floating behind her, freed now (she is all light, glowing along the edges)
but suffering molecules of recollection. In the film adaptation, the cows
trot to the ringing of cow bells, the sparrows leave little black prints
all along the borders of a Get Well card. The dying patient looks
out the hospital window, watches the smokers enroute to their
automobiles, great forties bulwarks of Buicks parked in neat rows,
and like a great network of veins carrying energy, he can sense the wiring
running under the pavement and up inside each cylindrical, aluminum
light pole—a chorus of voices in the evening, a few severed windpipes,
the sizzling of light bulbs. Two dolls in Speedos walk down a corridor, gesticulating,
the odor of hot molded plastic. Little bolts of lightning form radiating halos
around their orange non-haircuts at 100 FPS. They’re carrying assault rifles. The geese
have yet to make it to the other side. The waiting cars are now the ones honking.
David Dodd Lee is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014) and Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), as well as a forthcoming book of collages, erasure poems, and original poems, entitled Unlucky Animals. His poems most have appeared in New Ohio Review, Ocean State Review, Guesthouse, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, The Nation, and Willow Springs, and other places. He writes and makes visual art and kayaks in Northern Indiana, where he lives on the St. Joseph River. He is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, where he is also Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press, as well as the online literary magazine The Glacier.
Image: greatfallstribune.com
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