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LANDSCAPE
I am the distance from birds to Jerusalem
Is a metaphor I like, just because
It follows the laws of calculus,
Much as how the chicken crossed the road:
Not why, but how —
A humility of science:
In the first instance,
There is a point A, which is fixed,
And a point B, which is in flux,
And I am the distance
Between them. In the second,
Two objects collapsing in on each other
In an oblique time,
The car pushing perpendicularly,
The chicken running hysterically
Across the long way out,
Children cheering on both sides
Of the upright road. Which goes along
With a story about my mother
When she was a newborn: They
Ran back to the tent
And found her cooing, next
To a bomb that didn’t explode. And so
They named her the amusing one.
I do not say the shelling
Scattered them, I do not say
What Daniel my friend told me: how
He fled across four borders,
And with each
A cerebral malaria that nearly killed him.
The ducks, however,
Get it right from the first time.
The goats, less so, run
Straight ahead of the car for a while,
Before they find their sidestep. The drivers
Slow down, or gun it, and grin.
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