JOB INTERVIEW
His forearm was a forest
He scanned it wearily
for stranded kittens
and criminal campsites
His gaze traced the course of subcutaneous blue rivers
weaving lazily betwixt his scars and zits
This one a lot like his father’s jaundiced eye
That one the cliffs
from which acid addled hippies had once thrown themselves
Outlaw cliffs
Cowboy cliffs
Anasazi cliffs festooned with indecipherable petroglyphs
All this he saw before him
His powers of observation were honed now
and his forearm was a forest
Perhaps a giraffe
Perhaps a giraffe will be formed
when this lustrous detritus begins to congeal
Somewhere out there
a sand painting hovers on a gust of diesel exhaust
But here
An ancient crystal of salt
Having once adorned the bloody brow of haughty Agamemnon
lies suspended
in a plastic cup of urine
Wal Mart’s inquisitor sees it not
Wal Mart’s inquisitor sees nothing
Wal Mart’s inquisitor sees not the grimaces
belligerent monkeys display as they grapple with serpents and wildebeests tumbling deftly across the formica
Wal Mart’s inquisitor sees not
Mandalas quilts and fingerprints
Feels not the miracle of molecules
and their softly insistent collisions
Reads not the Byzantine calligraphy the slugs leave so unhurriedly
But he
He could see it all
He could feel everything
He critiqued the poetry of spiders
His powers of observation were honed now
and his forearm was a forest
MUSIC