The naked woman’s pointing, but toward what?
Does she covet an otherworldly flower, larger
than her head, and is telling the round-eyed,
pettable-looking lioness to fetch?
Serenely, a dark figure in a striped skirt
plays a tune. Some kind of orange fruit hangs,
round as moons. No one asks who moved a couch
into the middle of a jungle or what the furry,
bird-shaped creature in the background means.
Easy to miss, a small elephant blends into the trees.
Plant leaves gesture like arms. A snake starts to make its way
out of the picture, though I’d rather stay here
than in most of the landscapes I dream myself into—
prisons, train stations, dead-end streets. Always somewhere
I’m struggling to get to—no signs,
my ticket lost. Still, I’d trade Rousseau’s
luscious greens and the pleasure of the unexpected
for a nightly repetition of the fragment I had once,
five years ago, shattered by a workday alarm—
a plain room with bare, tan walls, my mother
in a frilly bed, alive and smiling.
