by Tom Snarsky
Yokes
I’m standing right behind the Great
Eye of Everything, in its optic nerve spot
So it has to make me up from my
Surroundings, plus its best guess. Actually
That spot is in the front, the little pinhole
Whose light lands right on the nerve-root
Unless I’m wrong again. A friend
Is someone who, when you’re wrong, tells you
There are more important things than being
Right. I’m that upside-down light
Never flipped back over in the brain
Or the rain, wetting your wrists as you lift
The turtle from the road, carry her
To the safe grass, wet too, head hidden
So even though you help her parry cars
Turkey vultures plastic 6-pack rings she can’t
See you, & won’t come out until you are gone
Things of Nature
It’s a lawn
-flamingoes-on
-their-sides November
so far, which makes sense
—you can hear the cold in its name
though maybe not the rain, which comes
and comes. Death is a different tack
than you’ve taken till now, all its angels
lined up like the first day
of preschool, when you don’t yet know
anybody’s name, or necessarily
how to ask. The plinth of
our mercy is another
similar mercy
we didn’t receive
but still dwell on,
an old lover who was
obviously cruel
and under that is the old bandage
gone platelety yellow
the color of the lawn
flamingo’s rusted top leg.
Your uncle walks into the bar
where I am telling you all this and
asks, What are you guys talking about?
You think quicker than me and say
We were just talking about high school
and Dad. One wrinkled bell
pepper tossed out in the grass,
and the mower approaching.
Poem
Sometimes you see
people’s psychotic breaks on
social media, god stretching
his empathy muscles too
far, the ozone healing
in time to trap the next century
of heat, the devil locking
eyes with you from across
the bar. You can’t spell “eyes”
without “yes” although most
of what we behold we hold
in hesitant abeyance—
could you imagine saying yes
to everything you see, less
an imaginary scenario more
a material question
of witness, back-pocket
option always to turn away,
& yet I’m curiouser now than
I’ve ever been about
AI safety, paperclips we
might all someday be. If
god is too busy to answer
I have one more question
I’d risk: who planted me
in this garden? Who
presupposed all this?
Tom Snarsky lives in Virginia