Seven Poems from Viewers at Home

Kate Colby

Easter Eggs

If our world is a simulation
made by a higher order of

being, what did they embed
for their own entertainment?

Sinkholes, axolotls, dreams,
that Turkey is Peru in Portuguese.

Sometimes there’s a secret room—
my daughter is one, I think.

She is infinitely regressive.
Every night she says I love

you even more until
I stop saying it back.

The idea that we
are not our own

is as old as words
allow us to think it.

Pixelated light on
the river at night

must be the makers’
bad anachronism.

Theory of Anything 

They found a burning
bush in an acceptable

desert, only it’s not
a tree but a cave that

glows when the sun
is low. Your eyes do

conceive you, delivered
people—we are chained

down in the mouth,
inside-out flames

just as promised, a land
is made in our likeness.

A man has stars in his
knees and oxen hitched

to the earth’s axis, which
is how we turn—where

there’s an axis
there’s an origin

of zero coordinates, but
not the same as nothing.

Geometry is wanting.

Autoclave

From the middle-
distant medical

complex, billows
of bodies regain

the air the empty
rooms surrender.

If created in another’s
image, our essence is

an optical effect—
the brain a key

to words for what
it reflects. Christ’s

sake, Kate, you’re
all a cloud might

think you look like
from this height:

a cataract of common
wealth’s golden dome,

the whole of human
history achieves me.

Thingking

Most things consist
of how you see them

(a bone-shaped bone
is usually a humerus).

Flying by the seat of the sound,
these minutes within windows—

nameless trees, eponymous sky—
how everything transpires today.

Three times I lay one down.
Three times a puff comes up

from the hole and it slides
to the floor, its dusting of

paper thrones. Bad subject,
I am laughing in an iron lung.

Leibniz is said to have dropped
the “t” from his name because

he didn’t believe in time
to believe in time to save

something: these weeds,
dumped mattress, bloody ticking.

The Rest

Time is a line with
different extremities

but “late” means both
going and gone. You

don’t pack an elegy
with abstractions, say,

“generous,” while some
specifics it’s best to omit

from the epitaph—
“Always ordered

the chicken sandwich.”
Events don’t happen

in time, they make it,
as language is made

of how we mean it.
(I mean the opposite.)

I’m left with this
fistful of fletchings,

the point to which
we never got.

  —for Craig Watson

Looker

If we are here to witness
the world, what happens

when we see what we
are not designed to?

Cells divide on slides,
a river slithers from

an airplane window,
a girl applies mascara

to the camera. I saw
a sunfish once, thick

pad of fucked-up flesh,
floating—what good

does this ugliness?
Alien form of being

what it was. I have been
threaded with a scope,

am clear in there. Out here,
my golden fleece fades into

the side of the hide
that holds the meat.

Man Alive

What we see is not
the object: frescoes

peel away from plaster,
pigment falls and holy

raiment wanders off
like a wraith returned

to the artist’s intention.
Ben-Hur is there to watch

the crucifixion, but dead
can mean completely, as

in reckoned, set or right—
perfection is a sort of life.

Even chickens after the rain
take all the color of light.