Poem about an imaginative boy who hid in a witch's backyard to avoid doing chores. |
Morley sank into the deep fescue hiding from the Whirlpool, the Amana, the Kirby, under the branches of the sweeping elm. The afternoon buzzed beyond the fence beyond the witch's backyard beyond the wind which pulled the branches into a sway, sweeping shadowy fingers over Morley's chest. Cat's claw blossoms hissed and fell, their poison shaping Morley’s world into anything but ordinary, t- e-l- e-s-c- o-p-i-n-g his eyes, lifting his wire-framed glasses right off his head, stretching his sockets up into the branches of the sweeping elm. Twisting and climbing, his lenses explored mockingbird architecture, squirrel-stashed harvests, black beetle borings, his eye-tipped tentacles extending past the pumphouse, the stables, the swing set in Angela's yard, his self-aware eyeballs, his ocular duo, relaying fiber optic messages, extruded carbon black snakes whispering sights of fire hydrants, sidewalks, the Peckinshaw Bridge, stretching all the way to the county line, finger tubes of vision, rubbery peepers, crossing the border, tip-toeing across Virginia, the cartoons caricatures of a Yellow Pages ad. Morley's bionic binoculars slinked, sleep-walking into the sinking ocean, pushing past sharks and submarines, the White Cliffs of Dover, Saudi Arabia, and Lianyungang, playing hop-scotch with planes over French Polynesia, transversing and tangling with trans-Pacific cables, sightfully spanning the Grand Canyon at its deepest widest point, returning, three-sixty, to memorable mountains, his street, his house, and the witch's backyard, where the last thing he saw was himself wearing wire-framed glasses fast asleep under the branches of the sweeping elm where a FLASH of magnesium blackened his vision and made his eyes burn with the stinging fire of infinite feedback, from which moment on, he saw only darkness until he awoke. |