Brooks Lampe

Chair Sliding

On Little Girl in a Blue Armchair by Mary Cassatt

And so we embrace a kind of thrift
hiding at the bottom of things, look for faces
rising from the bottom of the well. We have energy
and devote it to rescue. Gardens, harbors,
railroads, skies: all the things sick hearts love.
A dreary fire completes what we know.
Call to witness the pines with ice-covered valves
the scorched earth, the shore of a brow.
Whatever you believe in be absolutely certain
it is calling out like a photograph:
children slide down chairs and
do not care about time or X-ray vision, no
they love a couch’s yielding curves,
its desperate passion for the floor.
They see a fiddle that wants playing,
a melody the shape of homesickness.
A child is an organ piped over and over
and sings as she slides to the tune of a place
far away, still pliant to imagination,
a wide world still within reach
of a body that is growing legs
and feet that can’t quite touch the ground.

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Brooks Lampe teaches writing, literature and philosophy at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. He is the editor of Uut Poetry, a Substack exploring surrealist writing techniques and the author of the chapbook, The Planet of Left Hands. His poems have appeared in Peculiar Mormyrid, Right Hand Pointing, Bombfire and elsewhere.