Magnolia

The Furniture

It’s funny what can happen: A chair learns to walk
by itself and teaches all the other chairs to walk too,
by example, and suddenly the streets of the city
are full of all kinds of furniture going
everywhere—you name it—still blind but moving
with ever greater confidence, for the sheer joy of moving,
at first, and then with an increasing sense
of coordination and direction. And soon they’ve taught themselves
to see dimly and to hear the hum of silence
around them, broken only by their own awkward bodies
moving where once was landscape and trees,
houses full of people, cars moving up and down the streets.
And then they’ve learned to breathe, to sing—it seems a miracle—
these chairs and splintered tables crowding all the streets
in rain and sunshine, singing as though they were
mammals, or birds that haven’t learned to fly,
though soon they’ll be soaring, I’m certain, as soon they’ll be
swimming, learning to breathe underwater,
to hold their breath and dive all the way to the bottom
where they’ll shiver and gleam in the dark.

Suppose, one spring, the birds decided
not to fly north, and the animals
sleeping in the woods decided this year
they’d rather not wake, and turned over instead
for another dream.

Imagine one summer the butterflies decided
to stay in their cocoons, or the caterpillars forgot
to wrap themselves up inside themselves
and simply gorged themselves instead
until their season passed. One day the tide forgot to rise.
This is only one way of speaking for the world.

Suppose the spiders stopped weaving, mosquitoes
forgot how to suck our blood, bees
decided not to pollinate flowers.
Suppose the sea turtles never returned
to the beaches that bore them, to lay their moon-drawn eggs.
Or suppose for a moment the rivers held still
and the leaping salmon held still in mid-air.

Imagine fire stopped burning things to ash
although it still burned. It was no longer hot.
Of course that couldn’t happen. So think of something else.
where they’ll shiver and gleam in the dark.

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