The Speed Wobbles
Looking out at the Rockies through a
Plexiglass oval, I reconsider the Star Child theory:
dropped by spaceship on a remote clifftop,
adolescent alien sacrifices itself
in a mountain stream, its blood seeding the planet
with the building blocks of humanity.
Spaceship goes zip —> bing!
and we’re not supposed to wonder
who invented the inventor. Sure,
diagram hemoglobin ‘til the cows come home
but whose cows are they?
Whose home really? My parents
had a system of blood-dumping chalices
sprung by a torture device and
strung through millennia by catchy phrases
like a Mouse Trap game.
Local nuns pray constantly in order
to keep a line open to the big whatever-it-is.
Meanwhile John goes silent
for ten rotations each orbit, and that
would make sense if sense wasn’t a word.
To plug into the flow, my boy
puts on headphones, rolls out on his longboard.
One day he hits the slightest
bump in the pavement & a wave of increasing
amplitude ripples & bucks through his deck:
The Speed Wobbles. Control
blinks away and he’s launched at the curb,
a pure arc of electricity pinwheeling
against the sky. It’s an origin story:
wired to crash and survive, his mythology begins
a little scraped and tangled but alive
in the Petersons’ arbor vitae.|
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