Illusion

Even the eye can forget its tears,
the mouth its fondest lamentations.
Face pressed, attentive, to the glass,
the world’s a wheel, a shadow box,
a zoetrope with slits through which
we glimpse a strip of paper where
horses and birds are drawn. The wind
spins it around, or waves of air rising
warm from the lamp on which it rests:
cunningly, limbs leap from frame to
frame, crest obstacles, fluoresce.
But there’s no other word for this
wobbly apparatus of our discontent.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.