Carol Muske-Dukes

Yes, I wanted them to levitate. Unfortunately, I hadn't a leg to stand on. Cut-out camels plodded across the blackboard's high sill. Yet the desert below refused to unfurl its mica wings. When I asked them to try to remember, to release a soap bubble from their marvelous arsenal of wands, they resisted. They lined up, suspicious in individual spotlights. The fountain inside the scissored palm could only rise so high, maybe just a trumpeted C. Which is high, but not like those huge blue dreams that used to float by, shot from cloud-atomizers, the original public breeze on its back in the grass. Let's try to guess who or what is being borne up by this caravan of thin- skinned humps, a-bulge, inoculated? I tell you every one has a rider, a crop. It's been done this way for some time. If we pause here by the pillars of sand, up to our poet-knees in anarchy, won't each gulp of hoarded water from the toppled monument be sweeter passed hand to hand in the sun-colored dipper? Up to our thighs in it now, and spared what drills it- self into the rock daily, so it can claim to know zero after zero, and make that nothing into a sound like silent bells, split parched hooves, plodding.