Two Poems:

Pliny I & II

I stepped on a bird this morning. It had fallen between
     two parked cars. My boot-heel made it make a quiet,

sobbing noise, not at all like birdsong. It was
     brittle and soft at once, like matchsticks inside

chewing gum. As a child in Rome, I dreamed someday
     I would be Emerson's "transparent eyeball." I tried

different ways to disappear: I wore a football helmet
     everywhere. What I found out was: you can't

be a transparent eyeball in a football helmet.
     I feel better in the dark. I compare the dark

to chocolate: some rich, naughty substance covering
     my body. That would be invisible — to be dipped in chocolate.

That's no football helmet. What if pain turned
     the bird inside out, what if its own scale were volcanic?

You've got to get yourself dirty to imagine it.
     You've got to get down on all fours and bark.

                         

I became a tiny eye to see into the eye of a sparrow,
     a cricket's eye, a baby's eye; when I looked

at the night sky I made my eye as big as history, for
     the night sky is a kaleidescope of past-times,

as noted astronomer Carl Sagan said. I watched TV and
     made my eye a TV: lidless, rash gazer at whatever happens,

casting shadows of what happens for the neighbors,
     whose eyes are the size of windows, my windows, and sharpen

their sight to voluptuous desire, voyeur voyeur
     pants on fire. Anything half-seen becomes what's on,

becomes the neighbors' newscast, lotto drawing, rerun.
     How do you know a child had died, except by watching

trays of casseroles brought in, the old sit down,
     peoples' bodies doing as bodies will against the wall?

"There Is a Star in the Sea"

          Pliny, Natural History, Book IX

"There is a star in the sea, and it burns up everything
     it touches. Though men who walk on land deny it,

one night a star fell from the sky and landed in the sea.
     It had the good sense to become a fish, but the wit

to keep its shape. It sleeps on the bottom of the sea
     but one day I'll play a trick on it — I'll turn the ocean

upside down! Then it will shine again, coral bluff,
     rusted galleon in the night sky, and I will pray to it."

Dan Chiasson
Boston Review
September/October 2005

Copyright © 2005 by the Boston Critic, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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