Poems by Dan Raphael

PICTURES TO SHOW

I was excited to show melba
the pictures from my trip
then slowly realized
the only place I’d gone
was to sleep, but still the energy
of a few days of meeting new places & people
when I’m not sure what I’m remembering
was experienced awake or asleep

soon after waking yesterday
I found a rat writhing in a trap
and I had to kill it.
the day before that had been
unseasonably warm, spring color
in various stages of reveal
& that carried into yesterday

you can wake up any time during the day
you can wake up more than once in the same day
you can go weeks without being where you are


NAVIGATING THE MULTI-VERSE

I’ve said that once I’ve driven somewhere I could always
get there again but when you go somewhere that’s many wheres,
when past and future the same coin but of what realm,
no heads or tails just legs and wings, fins and mouth
flow adapting to e-gress and in-, a river sailing me,
cloud divided among dozens of alveoli, horizons floating
and fading in every direction, watercolor cartography,
deserts as deep as oceans, mountain barely big enough to trip over

technology from 3 million years ago that’s still functional
still changing, sometimes temperature polkas, sometimes sound
retreating to my left arriving at my right, scattered while seqeintial
as my talents are a mix of sewer, railroad and vending machine
liquid pouring without cup or drain, sealed objects
that won’t let us pass until we pick them up
and then become too fidgety to handle, try to
race ahead of us, scattering in several directions

rubik’s dice: changing numbers of sides & values
as spun, as resisting, more symbols than numbers
in an alphabet I’ve never learned, from a race with more
or fewer fingers, where counting is prayer
where gambling is conversation, as what moves to the center
gets broken apart & recombined, as the dice can change
what’s holding them, as a ball may awake mid-flight
may fall out of or change momentum

that’s the way the earth bounces, no sky in my pie,
a compass too polite to point, the first word in direction
is dire, when I see myself somewhere else
my only choices are escape or be invisible
walking into sleeves, rising onto wheels
no door to close and just one pedal