poemimage

Seeing the unseen between my eyes and outer space

I was a boy painting my sparkling new bicycle

With house paint

Squinting in the shade of a sunflower

Wiping soil and lumps of melted star off the brush

Aiming for that white-as-a-skeleton-invisible-sky-hourglass

Concept of two gods becoming one

Me and my bicycle at the intersection –

Red lights fading my pupils dilated

from Jawbone – Ekstasis Editions – 2005

When I was a boy in Kansas City, one summer, I studied the sky. It was a dull white far off in the distance, and yet up close ‘it’ was invisible. So it dawned on me to paint my new bicycle white; up close the bicycle would be invisible, at a distance everything would seem normal. My mother was more than happy to keep me busy and found the paint and a couple of large brushes. I threw myself into the task, painting the seat, the chain, the handlebars…everything! Sadly the next day the paint flaked off and my experiment failed. Several decades later I was reading a creation myth about two gods battling in the sky. One god lost a foot to a sharp knife and black ‘blood’ (night of course) filled the sky. I remembered painting the bicycle, and decided to harmonize both ‘sky’ narratives, intertwining them in a poem. My editor reviewed my work and, being a minimalist, took out her pen; underlining, crossing out, and circling lines. In the end I had a nine line poem.