by Daniel Galef
The sun is low, and getting lower. It does that sometimes, I think.
It is hanging on the end of the branch, through perspective or
magic,
A single blinding fig.
A blinding —
A single, blinding plum.
A —
What does a plum tree actually look like?
I am keeping my fingertip on the return ticket in my pocket,
Something to tie me to the real world I have taken leave of,
To remind me that I am an outsider here, that nature is just a dream.
That the real world is square and shimmering and I own a small but respectable part of it.
The sun is yellow, I think, and soon it will be red.
I think away from figs to things that exist, that you can see, like traffic lights.
I think to my middle-school driving instructor —
That means slow down!
And my type-A father —
That means speed up or you?ll miss it!
I now know what the sun is.
Fuck figs.
The cloud of starlings
(herd flock murder probably flock)
Is reeling and swooping across the screen of the sky
In the improbable geometries of a roller coaster car.
My venereal nouns lost forever or at least until I no longer need them,
My history returns. Well, relatively. Some colonial eccentric who liked Shakespeare.
The underside of each starling is white, like a star,
Or like the smog from an industrial smokestack that is producing a condensible vapor.
Swoop.
Whee!
(Your souvenir photograph is on sale at the booth.)
The top of each starling is black, like the space between stars,
Or like the smog from a smokestack that is producing actual smoke.
As the herd of starlings swoops about, they flip back-to-front, in one continuous wave.
The clattering flap display of the arrivals board at the train station.
A minuscule electronic nudge, and
Flutterflutterflutterflutterfluttercrack
All the times are updated to the sound of the autumn wind
disturbing the skeleton branches
Or is that backward?
No, the trees don?t make the wind.
?
I compare a number on my wrist with a number in my pocket
And see that they are favorably compatible
Then drop the train ticket and pick it up and drop it again and take off my mittens.
My hands are city hands.
And I am not sure that they will not pass through these country columns
I mean trees
Like a ghost
Or like real things pass through a ghost.
Can two ghosts — ?
Two ghost-like birds ambush the branch that is holding up the sun
One makes a sound that it learned from a car alarm
And the traffic light has fallen from its cantilever beam.
It is suspended halfway between pavement and fig (?) branch
And red.
STOP.
And dad —
Well at least check to see if anyone’s around first.
Nobody is around.
First.
And the sky is turning colors that I can’t compare to anything at all.
Daniel Galef has been an actor, a teacher, a door-to-door poll taker, and a dictionary definition (“interfaculty,” which means “brilliant and handsome”). His poems, short stories, and miscellaneous magical writings have appeared in Bards and Sages Quarterly, Rat’s Ass Review, The Surreal Grotesque, and The Christian Century.
