Yes, and…
Your home becomes engulfed in mosquitoes
so you begin putting pins through them
and connecting them with a single string
making something of a night sky there
in your living room, one you have to
plot. There is the Scarecrow constellation,
and here the Iron Maidens. Eternity so near
you can’t pretend you don’t hear her forever
trumpets coming, and behind them the years
dumb and dour as mammoths, the Rubik’s cube
black on all sides. You don’t know how
you got here but you know to map
any sort of magic is to starve
a dragon or lock a fairy in a bird cage.
So you keep looking for yucks
in the saddest facts possible—a tree grows
its knuckles of fruit. Heaven is exactly three days older
than previous models predicted.
And when Napoleon waterskis past
with Cleopatra on his shoulders, you have to
say yes, and…and when your mother is calling
at three in the morning…and when suddenly
you are tip-toeing around a word like a thief
down a hall of mousetraps: yes, and
yes. Experience is what people name
their mistakes, and nobody told you
which aches would come again
asking her do you remember
who the president is, when man landed
on the moon, what color pills
did you take? Now you wait
for your mind to go, the mouths
to come. Peel back this map and you can see
their meandering tracks, this house
you lay awake in, wolves collecting
their voices in the nearby dark.
Jeff Whitney is the author of five chapbooks, two of which were co-written with Philip Schaefer. Recent poems can be found in 32 Poems, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Sycamore Review, and Verse Daily. He lives in Portland.