After Magritte

The sill is clammy to the touch, and the view familiar.
But doesn't that moon seem a little too familiar?

His severed hand had been in someone's pocket.
The stars hang perilously above Rue Familiar.

The whore's pigeons seemed safe under his bowler,
But when he spotted an opening, the banker grew familiar.

His cloud saddle strapped to the sky's flanks,
The Liberator arrived out of the blue. Familiar

Ideas, like glass shards, lay all over the floor,
Each with a part of the field pasted to familiar

Problems from the front page--the war, the scandals.
Men in uniform left us free to pursue familiar

Desires. But which came first, the cage or the egg?
What you dreamt was overdue, what you knew familiar.

Who owns the light? Who sold the sea its waves?
Perspective is the devil's new familiar

If all property is theft, nothing's left to give
The old man in Brussels but a few familiar

Imitations on cheap posters, enough to make seem
Strange what delicacies had been hitherto familiar.

Here is the pearl that made a grain of sand,
And the bricked-up alphabet that made you familiar.


From TEN COMMANDMENTS (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)