I get up in your Easter Island face again today,
I take my students so they can see
outside again, as if we could ever step
out of the time of masks, of screens,
O to get danger just close enough,
the classroom too safe, enamel, too proof,
where proof means left out,
even the muse needs ID.
Like, in that building it’s always raining,
like one says, meaning the windows, bird-proofed, or are they
like us, like you, sky-continuous,
marked like the scarf around a concrete shoulder?
House, Tin, Concrete, Girl with Ponytail.
What big eyes you have, they say,
like someone wolf underneath
And you, Syvette:
Between Picasso and 45,
between my life only children,
the tablecloths became a landscape.
I painted in my mind all my life.
And the wolf underneath:
I left the hoodie on the branch.
It’s yours. As I am like you.
Every time I say earth
what I mean is world.
And the woods: no comment, of course.
Like you.
Like you, painting in your mind all your life.
Like you and the not-you about whom you said
It’s too ugly to be me the first time you saw her,
like the city and its tin houses, kingdom come,
like my students at times almost entirely
behind your trapezoid sides
I bet a bird seldom crashes into.
Michael Tyrell is the author of three books, most recently The Arsonist’s Letters (Backlash Press 2021). With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Agni, The Best American Poetry, BOMB, The Iowa Review, New England Review, The New Republic, The Night Heron Barks, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He teaches writing at NYU.
Image: “Sylvette,” a Pablo Picasso sculpture on Bleecker Street, New York City by Michael Tyrell
Pine Hills Review 