WhatNowHere

You see what looks

like a Roman chariot, minus a wheel

on the campus grass. And you realize it

is a Roman chariot minus a wheel.

Some high school kids, up for Latin day

must have built and abandoned it

like soldiers in flight. How it has been

of late: the world more wondrous

than your will to imagine it.

An actual chariot. Or those lights

on the hill, now, across the valley night.

You think them stoplights blinking late

isolation in mist, but soon understand

that what you see is in fact a Ferris wheel,

a fair in our city tonight. And you know

that part of that same light is the light caught

in eyes of riders of that twirling circle. Do they see

the shadow that is you, a shifting dark far-off?

The world speaking to you, weights

and textures saying look already, right there,

a Ferris wheel, people turning on its thinly

bolted core. What more do you

at least now need? See the fiery ring, wheel rolling

its mythic form, like you

no more or less than itself.




—appeared originally in The Marlboro Review