LOOKING AT US LIVING
Through the binoculars, we saw us
moving through the foliage.
The world was on rewind:
a herd of horses ran
backwards across a field.
Yellow leaves kept climbing back
to their branches.
“What’s the opposite of fall?” I said,
and he said “Spring.”
Then it was August, then July,
then June. The sun kept
leaving and coming back
like a boomerang that no one
ever had to throw.
Snow appeared
on the ground, then it started
unsnowing, the flakes
travelling upwards.
I knew that soon
we wouldn’t know each other
so I asked him
what the opposite
of stay is.
He stood there,
his hands on his hips, thinking.
—from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
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Megan Moriarty: “For me, a poem is a place where everything is possible. Life can be stopped and rewound. Through writing, you can look at that possibility, and see what impossibilities—what human things—keep showing up anyway.”
