There are answers
                 in arrows, in their arched
paths in green air. Afternoon
                                 tea spilled into china,

and a girl — back to the crowd, hands wooden
as any snake charmer's — reads
                 the trajectory, the splitting
         of air, the landing, angle lodged

in the spilled grass. This is
                 the love of promise, stuck
45 degrees from the gentle lawn.
                 And there are answers in the carousel's chaos,

its spin, the rise of horses and reaching
for rings. Calliope tin
                         and swirl: shards of light
braid themselves into what must be

a man. A house — which is not
                 a house but the iridescent
curve of an oyster shell — is caught
                 under a spill of mud and rock.

There are answers, too, in the teen-aged lovers who drive the curves
of Red Hill Road until it bends into Kings Highway
                 near the elementary, near the brick church.
Or say they are grown and mute, peeling

                         the old wildness from their skins — couldn't they
         find answers there? Couldn't they look
into their hands and know something?
Who couldn't learn the secret —

         the tarot's tripping fool, the smooth language
runes scatter like salt?
                 A Saint Christopher medal swings
from the rear view of that Dodge.

 

 

Copyright © Nancy Kuhl, 2004.