First Person Meditation in a Distinct Landscape
Because I know how to count,
the clouds occur to me as numbers.
Coursing over the blue gums & the housebarns.
Condensing into bundles. Algebraic structures.
Helplessly attuned to movement, those whose
shapes I can make sense of become like friends to me,
forming colors on the horizon, tearing a hole
in the idea of color, color it is possible Paul Klee
painted most beautifully in pieces like “Fish Magic”
or “Flower Myth,” where scale is all but obliterated,
traded out for the fancies of the eye, birds the same size
as the moon, a sunflower where the sun should be,
the buildings devolving into lines of elementary
geometry in sketches like “Death for the Idea.”
Because I belong to a brain, each fox floundering
for a squirrel, each windmill, each protein
lines up squarely behind its name. Conspiring
together as sentences, they have served me
well in the symposiums, at the edges of hospital beds,
lingering like a stain on the mind, standing one step
behind the things they stand for, shadows or stalkers,
blotches on a photograph taken against the daylight,
a way to have the world & eat it too, making it so
there is always plenty to see even after I blink,
even after I lower the blinds.