Individual Voices / Natural Forms
Winter, 2006
Doren Robbins
Pulled Over
If I can just get it empty
enough, the little epiphanies,
there still are epiphanies,
despite the false epiphanies,
if you can withstand them.
Pulled over in the shade, more
and more drought and heat.
Eating in my car below a stand
of Alders, the Italian crust
in the white paper wrapping,
the famous Virgin's picture
printed on it, the crossed intense
yellow wheat sheathes under
her breasts thirty-thousand years
later, still there for some, for me.
A pink leaf and a whitish one
under it drew me over
from the bench, a cocoon
in there, little wreckage of
attachment when it passes,
that it will pass, that cocoon life
in a camellia bush, and the
absurdity of where to
fly to when it's done,
programmed in the wings
and the filaments of the nerves
in the delicate eyes, delicate
genitals, everything delicate
really, in them, and the rest
of us, some of us. The display
of what is beneath will come soon.
I see the little electric mask
of its face behind the already
transparent sheet, the secreting
in there, the watery-branched
eyebrows, the small flying skirt,
and the color-weave in the wings
florescent-intense for mating.
The absurdity of it, and the charm.