It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
Transporter or holodeck? Either I have rematerialized incompletely (sparkling shower of particles dimmer) or this simulated city has acquired a wobble, a tell. Puffy-jacketed people duck from awning to overhang along Newbury Street wondering if swan boats sail in the slanting drizzle or a hand-held foam-coated reservoir might suit better. Inside the Church of the Covenant, meanwhile, Tiffany glass somehow glows against cold puddingstone—how does a yoked god’s robe luminesce by cloud, its whiteness alive with ocher and smoky motion? Gazing at invisible sparrows, bracing an overlarge hand on a rock, he is surely transported too, that blink of tropical foliage behind him now, that dreamy blue, and him thinking how, lord, did I get to Boston? I drove, theoretically, via the hospital where nurses unhooked my mother from catheter, from I.V., and handed her over. Moved a bed downstairs, stocked her fridge with little bottles of virtual food optimistically labeled Ensure for safety and, for power, Boost. Counted and sealed her pills into rows of labeled oyster shells. Then, north, as if stillness were heresy. Back home a library of mountains I never read. Mosaic rain I smash right through. Look at the god, good-looking, how he looks at the ground, willing it real, willing himself to love where he hardly lives, in his stupid human body, an always ailing thing. Rather the sparrow be true than cells struggling to contain unlikely radiance, and failing. Compounding errors. The tumor an index of poisons, every one chiming as they transform her.
Lesley Wheeler is the author of the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds; the novel Unbecoming; and five books of poetry, most recently The State She’s In. Her poems and essays appear in such journals as Poetry, Ecotone, and Guernica, and she is Poetry Editor of Shenandoah.
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