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Deer Downtown
We stumbled upon an A-frame deep in the woods
not abandoned, lost or forsaken, but empty
none-the-less, a frame for hanging deer by the side.
I have always wanted to paint a gutted deer
with old house paints, the brighter the better, like those
mammals on Main Streets painted by local artists,
and auctioned off, proudly proclaiming local tastes,
but I want a trompe l’oeil of a salad bar
on a drawn deer, hanging like a silent wind chime
for no other reason than I could buy it cheap
perhaps even amass a herd, and I could build
my own a-frame beside the herd, with glass siding.
I do not imagine a Chamber of Commerce would approve
such a display on Main Street, even if the deer were replaced
with graphite replicas, since they work so hard at distancing
Capitalism from revulsion, and we know
some smart aleck artist would paint their gutted deer
all in thick red watercolor and wait for rain.
Multi-layered Mona Lisa
In about one month
the Large Hadron Collider
will go on-line, seeking
Higgs Boson and so much more,
or less, depending on your perspective
and now we have no idea
what will be discovered,
some say a black hole
will consume Earth
some liken it to the Tower
of Babel, doomed to failure
but most of us know
old frontiers will peel away
revealing new terra incognito.
The me mind with future events known
knows what will happen,
for now, Schrodinger’s cat
all futures are likely
have occurred,
even a black hole,
and then well,
well, well, well,
and beneath the Mona Lisa
lay three other versions
none quite right, painted over
unseen layers hidden, discovered
and now some people
who do this sort of thing
have performed a psychological
analysis of the Mona Lisa
her smile, her eyes,
and determined certain things
which are probably useless
if they did not also analyze
the emotions on the other layers
and take into consideration the fact
that the Mona Lisa is really
Leonardo da Vinci,
more layers like today
when he lay down
on the library lawn
the medicine plant woman
puts her finger into his eye
while someone else decried complexity
while she pulled an unwanted layer
off from his eye
and you, patient as I drove in
half an hour late
picking up our son
and you were fine
and he was fine
but this was just one event
one layer in a life
adding on other layers
which brings us back to David Hume
and some philosophy class in college
when my roommate and I
talked about religion
walking through a forested cemetery
and now he’s living
in the suburbs of turbulence
his orthodox life blown apart
by who knows how many eruptions
separating the layers
covering so many wounds
so after so many years
he sought me out
and how did I become
the stable one,
how long will I follow this fault line
how many times around the tunnel
traveling close to the speed of light
before I hit another particle
and we see what comes next?
Jon Mathewson has been widely published in journals, and waits for the imminent release of his
collection of some of those poems, While Strangers Insult the Decor (Foothills Publishing, 2009).
Email: Jon Mathewson
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