Audience
My audience
two obedient teddy bears
a technicolor cow
and an obsidian frog
from the Temple of the Moon
at Teotihuacán
Outside my window
the listening trees
clap their leaves
beating the wind
with their branches
Flowers lend deaf ears
for they are dead
dried and broken
by this deathly drought
In the next room
TV ads blare
in an effort
to silence my voice
Absence and presence
of water
the garden dry
fall foliage
crisp and complaining
useless tears flowing
down my cheeks
Audience
So important, the audience. But is what the poet writes what the audience hears? With an audience like mine, who knows? What does a teddy bear know about tears, drought, or doubt? Does a multi-colored cow suffer, like I do, when he hears the adverts on the television set? What does an obsidian frog, from the Temple of the Moon know about life in Island View? Carved in a desert, surrounded by volcanoes, some dormant, some liable to break into activity, does he understand the morse code words tapped out by the branches of trees?
How do we understand the pathetic fallacy in terms of the inanimate stuffed animals that sit upon my table? I talk to my teddy, the one that sleeps beside me in my bed upstairs. I talk to him, but he never replies. Opposite me, at my desk, sits Hairy Fred, my favorite teddy bear. He used to be an overcoat, until his creator bought the coat, cut it into fifty pieces and grew fifty teddies from the wreckage.
I guess he should know more about humans than most teddy bears, having wrapped them and kept them warm in a previous life. Alas, he too is silent. As in reality are the trees, the leaves, and the flowers. Silent, in the human sense, but full of a different sort of life that overflows with another set of languages, that creative people can hear, but seldom speak.
