Distant Buffaloes
        after Gail Boyajian

How you feel about any one thing at any given moment
is a matter of perspective, the shortest distance
between two points, parallel lines intersecting

and the vanishing point something mathematical.
You could draw it with your pencil. You can bend it.
As in this painting before me: hummingbirds

in the foreground gigantic, and distant buffaloes
diminutive as cats, while the tornado
bearing down over the hill is no bigger

than a blade of grass. Everything in the foreground
unperturbed. Even the Robert Frost man in a brown suit
sitting on the log. He's looking right at us, his thick white hair

glowing. Nothing to worry about, he seems to be saying,
his back to the funnel dangling down like a rope—
like an umbilicus. Like a whip.

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Copyright © 2015 Carol Potter All rights reserved
from Some Slow Bees
Oberlin College Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission