Seeing and Re-Seeing

Seeing and Re-Seeing

This city aches to be rolled past.

And so I do it. Roll past and through it,

Insinuate myself. I become a sinew

Of the city, a flexing tendon. My gaze dollies

Smoother than any image making machine.

My strafe-eye can hold

An instant or know a happening

With a ghost’s transit:

Moving through, uninvolved,

A moment’s insider, then gone.

The pavement is conveyor

To my hungry watch, bringing me

Seeings, seeables, sights, doings

Of many manner, shape, and drift;

Too many for any finite lister.

I am such a one, compiler of lists

That brim but are never quite full -

All jotted down in thought, but

Nonetheless set down for being inkless.

Housed in head, the listed seen can

Dabble in volition, rattling their cages,

Not to be set free but to be remembered -

Re-experienced in the cinemas of Sleep or Consideration.

One scene returns more than others

To the roadside that glides past closed lids

Unbidden at night, and sometimes, unchosen,

(When the couplings loosen between thoughts)

By day, a flickering matinee screening:

Two crows were pecking at something

Shouldering each other to peck the better,

Vying for food, it looked like, but traffic

Had my glances too, I am ever the divided

Attendee.

                    A bit of bread? But they were cawing

Loud and frantic, hopping, barging, as a tuft

Slid from between them and my gaze, revealing

Their quarry – it was no snack…

But a fellow crow, facedown in harried stiffness.

Hunched wings half splayed like a black angel

Unresponsive in the dust.

         Murder!?

This beaked anger and death cooled the sweat

On my face. I shivered, new-sure of the scene

And looked on, waiting at a red light.

But the next peck had a tenderness,

Is this regret? Or are they trying to revive?

Now a beak was slowly lifting this lost life,

Only to let it drop back down, hopeless, very dead.

Already a ruffled effigy, soulless and stiff.

So my first guess had dissolved. It was not anger

But mourning, panicked and desperate.

With screams and shakes to wake a dead friend.

But the light went green and I was gone.

I settled on this sense of the scene in departure,

But these winged deeds remain foreign

To my wheeled pinioning, my cycles

Of thought. I must remain featherless and

They will never ride a bicycle, never

Stop or go at the behest of a traffic light.

This difference only enhances the power

Of this extended glimpse to replay in me.