Rolling the globe
You set the globe on the floor and it
rolled
toward the door, the flattened seas
and mountains
drawn to the light. Even then, it was
damaged,
already doomed, its surface a portrait
of betrayals,
pastel nations blurred and fading in
their thick
black boundaries, oceans stained with
fingerprints.
How we had laughed, watching marbles
and dimes
roll across the floor’s tilted oaken planks,
and once,
an egg, just to see, you said, and we held our breath
as it rocked for a moment, then wobbled
toward the light, halted in its course
by the carpet.
But the globe ignores the carpet,
bumps
across the sill and hurtles out the
door,
across the porch and down the steps
into the yard.
Chenille
is the French word for caterpillar,
you said that
afternoon, your fingertips dipping
among the
bedspread’s white tufts for the pill
spilled from your
grandmother’s hand. It was lost,
rolled away, like the
world, like we might, too,
someday, out the
door, past the yard, away. But we found
the dime she
dropped on the gray carpet, laying
our cheeks against
its rough nap to see the silver glint.
We wanted to know
everything, unveil the invisible,
unravel the dazzle, be first to see
the dappled fawn
in green-gray camouflage, tease each
other
for mistaking the stone and its shadow
for a bear.
We stared at rubbled destruction on
the newspaper’s
front page, unsure whether we were
meant to see
beams or bodies, smoke rising or ash
falling, unable
to discern bricks from blood. We
fingered the globe,
distance an emphatic lie, closeness an
illusion.
We recovered dimes from under the
porch
and looked for the Ouija board all
that long summer,
our questions now forgotten, though
the Magic 8-ball
said, Most likely, Signs point to
yes, Concentrate
and ask again, and surely we
wouldn’t have asked
if we hadn’t known the answer. Cradling
the globe,
we were pilgrims with talismans and
oracles, threshing
the mysteries of our perishable youth,
not blind
and yet blind, no excuse for all we could
not see.
Lessons of the dark
Sometimes I think
of the animals
prowling the
garden in the dark.
Their appetites
and cautions
aware, alert,
alive.
They feign
nonchalance,
their elegant
listening
hunger
mute.
What
if I
could see them?
What would I say
to the doe and
fawn,
coyote, cat,
raccoon?
What warning could
I impart
of unstable poles,
rising seas,
that they don’t
already recognize?
I wonder what they
think about us—
our chatter and
clatter, our lights,
our disdain of
silence, change,
of everything
other.
Do they laugh at
us,
perhaps think us
animals
run a-
muck?
How
might we
teach ourselves
to speak with
them,
express our
regrets,
our sad apologies?
What lessons might
impel us
to honor their
subtle ways of
patience and
invisibility?
In flight
An egg wonders, falling,
if feathers would serve
better as wings or as
the ground’s welcome
embrace. What bribes
might gravity accept?
Is there time for regret?
What might I have become?
Does anyone see me here,
in my trajectory of light?
Artist, poet, and freelance writer J.I.Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg. Her chapbooks The Word for Standing Alone in a Field (Bottlecap Press), how to pronounce the wind (Paper View Books), and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23) were published in 2023.
