As If Made of Blue Legos
By Susan Firer
In inaccurate skin,
among hologram trees,
fresh from the tundra of dreams,
I hear public television say
that Jesus was trilingual.
Billie Holiday sings
the loss of plotliness,
the loss of onomatopoeiabreath.
Doris asks if I’ll touch
her titanium humerus—I do.
I go to Sheboygan to stand in
Emery Blagdon's "The Healing
Machine," which was brought in
pieces from the Nebraska Plains.
Its coffee can klieg lights' grace
and copper wire sculptures
leave burns all over me.
Death is like Russia:
beautiful, cold, expansive,
expensive. Ephesus says:
even marble turns to chalk.
Aldebaran is nearing
the end of its life.
Jupiter and the moon are
the closest they'll be until 2026.
It's 25-below wind chill. Winds
push iced piers into houses.
My wounds smell like strawberries.
Jim who once saw a UFO
and was too tired to tell anyone,
who rode a tiger, and
slept with his cornet's mouthpiece
stenciled on his lips, was a lifelong
Indiana water garden gang member,
Jim who delivered a baby
from my body, Jim, impresario
of poems, parking tickets, and
sky-blue hydrangeas, Jim who
"wore a crown of snow,"
Jim's ashes change the garden.
Who can sleep with banded
Jupiter so close to the moon?
Copyright Credit: Susan Firer, "As If Made of Blue Legos" from The Transit of Venus. Copyright © 2016 by Susan Firer. Reprinted by permission of The Backwaters Press.
Source: The Transit of Venus (The Backwaters Press, 2016)