tiny frights

This poem is in honor of David Lynch. Even though (or because) it’s written by a heteronym, I think it’s true to my own weirdness and dorkiness, and it was fun to write. I can’t think of a more fitting tribute.

Including a graphic version because the line breaks sometimes get messed up in online text.

Thanks for Meeting Me Here

In memory of David Lynch

A stone knife in a display case in a chilly museum,
a clearing in a forest of marble columns.
A clarity of itself surrounds the knife, invisibly.
Visitors see a blur of other. Outside, the rain too
has fallen a long way from home.
Grass, crabgrass, and purslane drink.
Soggy worms churn skyward.
The museum is a granite shrug.
The knife is the question.
The ripples that copulate across a puddle are another,
the guard’s blue shoes a third.
Clouds crumble to drizzle, dissolve a log to dirt.
Questions have no answers, only translations.
In the courtyard cafe
sits a boy with earbuds and a lazy eye. That acned head
will never be preserved in a glass case in a cold gallery
where people come on a Saturday afternoon for his face to show another,
then sit at round metal tables
questioning kombucha, quizzing perrier, interpreting wine.
What’s displayed never is translated. That’s the reason for the glass.
The visitor’s complicit in every case.
The owls around the museum, drowsing for moonlight—
Let’s try a thought experiment.
Let’s pretend they are owls. They’re smart enough.
Let’s consider over coffee how knife and owl are different
and we’re not.

— Basil Cartryte
2025-01-16