Thirteen Ways of Looking at Bubble Wrap
1.
Inside a box, I find it
choked by rubber band,
forced flush against
a new air purifier.
2.
The Marathon refinery.
The huffs of exhaust.
In the winters the pollution
makes it a nuisance
to breathe.
3.
Spent, a square sprawled
across the floor, it opens
a window into the wood.
4.
The cat punctures
a hemisphere with his claw.
The globes explode.
The matter wheezes.
The neighbors knock,
confusing us for bullets.
5.
Each nodule, a polymer
converted from a resin derived
from crude oil. I can almost see it
breathing. Teeming with atoms.
6.
What kind of thing
is a person. A clutch
of pneumatic joints.
A money problem.
A unit of storage.
7.
Show me what you’re made of.
Old dandelions. Mouse bones.
The teeth of a Pterodactyl.
What is it. What is the matter.
8.
Earthworks. Depressions.
Fat birds, punctuating a lake.
The inside of a lung.
9.
Held up to the skylight,
it parcels the sunlight,
corralling it into flocks,
herding the space into
blisters of plastic.
10.
Zuhandenheit, Heidegger
writes, meaning I can
only know the world
by making use of it.
11.
Because I refused to exit
the pit filled with foam cubes,
my father pulled at my arm
in anger until the elbow,
elastic to a point, snapped,
until, determined to bend
the material to his will,
he heard a pop.
12.
The cat munches
on the cardboard.
On the desk, a bottle
of insect killer. Above it,
a poem in the pastoral mode,
pinned to the wall, smudged
with printer ink, describing
the green world of daffodils.
The floor is clean.
Inside, the air is pure.
13.
Quickly, I lower the lid
of the garbage to quiet my smells.