Bob van Beek
Claymation Picture-poem
Walk with me
through Plasticine Park
under clouds smeared thick like Vaseline
and point out how still every tree is, how clueless they look,
how we are the only things moving here.
Look at me for a second
and look forward again, look around
like I do. Look at one and one thousand
blades of grass at once, look at the dun putty
they grow from, the sodden cranium clay.
Run way up ahead and jump up and down,
up and down on the spot, your arms struck skyward.
The sun is low like a blanket and you are a small star sewn into its corner.
I will laugh silently and follow your form to pinky fuzz,
a hazy dot of person, and I will bring you into focus with
my microscoping mind, I will think about how massively,
how fluidly I have been captured by you,
how natively we dovetail,
how malleable our days are now,
how I never hear that faint, sinister ticking anymore,
how instantly it evaporated,
how loose and airy my chest feels.
And I will run up to meet you with windmilling arms
and land my hand in yours, we will wobble down a nearby ditch
and scurry up the other side, we will find the ears that belong
to this massive head of lawn, we will look where its eyes are looking,
we will see what they see,
we will reflect it in our beautiful faces.
Disappearance
The woods around stretch on forever.
A woman’s shout flies down the river.
The river is silence to the rabbits and rats,
who have never heard another,
and any presence it carries, spiked or soft,
is hushed as froth to water.
Bob van Beek works at an art gallery and a supermarket while volunteering round the clock at the rickety verse mill in his head. His work has appeared in Symposia, Salient and The Art Lens. He lives in Upper Hutt.