Zoetrope

Jochebed Holding Moses
MFA Boston

 

Zoetrope 

Relics, it seems, of the thing

are always stronger than the thing itself. 

Palimpsest and pentimento, for instance, saint’s bones

Or saint’s blood

Transcendent architecture of what was possible, say,

once upon a time. 

                                    Charles Wright

                                    Relics

 Not recovery so much as uncovering

all those post-it notes you drew on –

whole packs - making your move. 

A small dot you’d follow across the square

slip of it, slip after slip, so that once

done, once set in motion with the thumb,

 

the dot’s flow is ticked slowly until it is

momentum, each page a feather maybe

in the wing of the particular bird you are

that day.  Or if not a bird, certainly

a leaf.  Attached to that accidental

glue, it is dormant, boasts

 

a years-long shelf life.  Today, it is Novocain

for my nostalgia, a still static film, film,

by which I mean movement, fractures of

fractions, every capturable motion –

& the latent wind it conjures on my cheek:

all those flicked snippets, is it

 

yearning or grief that sees me back more

than fifteen years, behind you

in the doorway, face & shoulders bent

like a penguin with her egg, nosing

it warm with the tip of her bill,

nursing it against the wind, earnest not

 

to expose it too soon to the suffering

and the surrendering, nosing it to the dark

once more, the first static then momentous

zoetrope of motion making the bird inside it

glow & grow until, too big for its first home,

rises from something broken, the mother’s

 

shell her own body built now being propelled

across the snow.  Unsuturable, those

blown open pieces.  But I wonder, if

collected, if mâché to paper, if shaped to

the wheel, would they be pieced together

enough when it is set to spin, will they, again, be?