My Winter Poem

Flicker Vertigo

Two old pilots play chess in the park,
hearing aids off, cataract eyes
unable to track disturbances
in an air of newsreel memories.
Contrails corkscrew
toward animals cringing in fur
like dowagers in a bad neighborhood,
and glint struck off a propeller tells a story
begun far from here. It's a parable made luminous
with silver nitrate and dust, about their wars,
when charged images flicked past too fast to register.
Information received at 15 spins/second
always condenses thought to pudding,
ricochets off the exits
under the perpetual threat of fire.
A riffle of stills, too, can fool the eye
into a perception of continuous motion;
the brain fills in what’s missing,
the blanks between light and light,
a corrugated sky hanging over
the theater’s false ceiling. It's where
wounds still bloom, where a pounding
in the temple calls up fists full of summer poppies
pushing through the scarred gray crust of winter.