Peripheral Visions

How many other drivers also notice
when driving past a schoolyard,
the child sitting by the fence
with his back crisscrossed by the chainlink
and his book bag in front of him
confining him to his own space,
with the world beneath his motionless feet,
while all the citizens of his childhood universe
not just pass but race by?

How many other drivers also notice
the child sitting at the outskirts of their vision
and see flashes of their own memories stir within their eyes,
then settle like dead cells in the vitreous humor,
while for an instant a resurrected child hijacks the car
and tightly grips the steering wheel?

 

Generations By Proxy

"Eventually each one must pair.
Inevitably each pair must part."

Gladiators with issue,
slaves who were given slave girls the night before
in dingy Coliseum cells where neither shrieks nor sighs
delayed the trumpets heralding the games.
And in the sunlight bored spectators turned thumbs up or down,
while hawkers sold honied cakes and bitter beer.
The emperor sat on a dais sipping smooth wine,
while in the atrium the master of games counted coins.
A pageant played in the sun drenched arena,
with cheering crowds, those being cheered,
and fallen gladiators with stretched necks,
transfixed, almost blinded, by sunlight reflected from the victors' swords.
A whirlpool of populations,
Latins, Greeks, Semites, Teutons, Slavs, and Celts-
a sea of DNA foaming in the loins of bleacher plebeians,
or gurgling in the blood soaked sands,
or murmuring in the hearts of sobbing slave girls clutching their bellies.
An ocean of helterskelter genes coursed through the centuries
to conceive all of modern Europe.
Devotees of blood and theater, these grandparents
who birthed a continent of nth degree cousins,
a piecemeal assemblage of genes.

"Through blind meiosis and fecund fertilization,
indifferent to love, hate, and indifference itself,
every woman with child, every man with issue
might parent a distant generation."