Cardio Theater – a poem by Tom Snarsky

Cardio Theater

This flock of birds feeds on willingness
to merge with others in a common flight
over our quantum terrain of meaning-
lessness, our perplexed transvection an
object for discussion or disdain or distant
mistrust, at least for as long as our fathers
are still around, seemingly always recited
in the King James translation, “who art”
&c., & who indeed, feeling like Geoffrey Hill
on a Monday afternoon, could be in heave-
n? & still a fixedness gets us, holds us in
arrears, tells me jokes but won’t help me
fix this tie or finish my eulogy, not mine but
one I’m meant to deliver, like fireworks or
cigarettes over a state border, a curve
these same birds traverse every day, some-
times even shitting on it, on the very idea
of separation, as their shifting cloud tight-
ens & then (at last) begins to disperse
into the reddish-pink of this finished day.

Tom Snarsky teaches mathematics at Malden High School in Malden, Massachusetts, USA