Wile E. Coyote Checks his Mood As He Falls Toward the Desert Floor
I am already thinking past
the pain this rapid change
of altitude has made inevitable,
a result precipitated by one
more grandiose bungle
that must, in retrospect,
seem comically ordained,
caused by my inability (due
perhaps to residual head
trauma) to calibrate exactly
the timing fuse on a rain barrel
stuffed with dynamite sticks.
Though I expect my battered
cranium will be orbited by stars
haloing a concussion when I
slither from under the boulder
that followed me to the desert
floor and sandwiched me
into insensibility, a quick shift
of scenery will find me fully
committed again to the pursuit
of a willfully ingenuous foe.
In a landscape indisposed
to extravagances of greenery,
hostile to all but the flat line
and empty of props save for sage
brush and panting lizards, is it
any wonder I obsess over this
thing with feathers? Genius
needs a target. The roadrunner,
an idée unfixed, has provoked
in me invention and improvisation,
a break out from the mundanity
of physical rules proscribing,
for instance, an emergence
of locomotives from tunnels
newly painted on the rock face,
or the disengagement of gravity
by a body pacing in the air
a thousand feet above the chasm.
I have challenged the expected
sequences with designs crafted
to apprehend one whose swiftness
exceeds our one-dimensional
comprehension. That various
flaws bedevil these contrivances
is of no dissuasive concern.
The workings of the spring
that cages its user in bent wire,
the rocket skates that explode
into fireworks have value because
their workings differ from what
is hum drum and practical. No
professor of factitude harbors
dreams of flyswatters enormous
enough to provoke trembling
in the limestone strata, nor does
any careerist engineer have wit
enough to challenge convention
with a limb-powered bat wing.
I do not lust for a garland of beak
and clawed feet. If I salivate,
my tongue tracing my elongated
snout, it is not that I contemplate
gustatory triumph, but, rather,
a new contraption has come to mind,
its risk presaging both further hurt
and regenerative hope, iterated
in the imagination like perpetual motion.
A native of Florida, Chris Bullard lives in Philadelphia. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Wilkes University. Grey Book Press published Continued, a poetry chapbook, in 2020 and Moonstone Press recently published Going Peaceably to the Obsidian Knife, his chapbook of environmentally themed poetry. Main Street Rag expects to publish his poetry chapbook, Florida Man, early next year.
