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Rebecca Foust
Parallax

When I met my muse, I looked into his face
& found my foothold on its bony planes,
hewn & drawn up like a mountain
into an angle of ascent, or maybe it was
one of repose. His large hands
quietened the birds trapped in my kitchen.
His voice rumbled somewhere
south of my stomach & the horizon
went sideways. When the ground below
heeled up like a skiff in stiff wind,
it was a sickness that also healed. Every bird
by then, had returned to the wild
& was flying upside down.

I’ve been here all along, he said, as if
knowing that might right the skewed world.
All direction is illusion, he went on,
a spell cast by your point of view. Meaning
migration. Meaning water. Meaning
water is strand is horizon is sky—each one
in a green flash will burn. No right or left
nor up or down, no real turns, or return.
He said it was spirit-level true: you just do
what you do & how it looks in the end
will depend on where you were, & who with,
when you made your last stand.
Then, he took my hand.

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