BPR 45 | 2018
—the falconer’s wife considers the satellite
Point of view, which is the realtor’s too:
powers of ten
plummeting a house
value till numbers kick the ass of
whatever our local opulence
has to offer. Dogwood at dusk.
A big so-what
for these off-white,
Kleenex-wadded flowers,
waney-edged, upturned
as supplicants.
I could covet my own mile-high
scene’s toy streets,
its lawn blobs, blacktop smudges
hugging the dread-locked broccoli trees.
Such worldly shifts in scale
scale us
open, making any surface
dream us inwardly
all the more so.
Likewise, our mortgage yoked
to syn-
chronous orbit tends to say
satellite’s
the typesetter here,
hon, its simula-
income marking what measure
can still be called
mine and yours.
Where to house
the annals of
our affections and their opposite?
The mews you built
can be seen from space,
doubles down on shadows,
painterly as some far-off pagoda.
It signals,
snapshot and axis upbeaming to one
antenna where the image
is strengthened. Things have the look
of being spied on.
I walk outside,
stand beside the window bars, wave up
in time
to miniaturize
myself,
rended or rendered
in fact, like the hawk
you tried to love
who disappeared herself
into a pine-walled forest forever.
The scratches on your face
haven’t healed. Maybe you know when the right
distance for looking
rocketed off. Time
I said I hated the wild
bird you brought home, I lied. Her eye
was all I envied. Up close she could talon-rip
into the rabbit’s fleshy neck, keep
that eye unflinching
which is yellow and no one’s
and owes nothing
to the seen.