Polska

On the six-mile lap around the glacial lake
my legs work so my brain doesn’t have to.
I don’t need to think to make my heart beat
but neither does it seem to stop, even with
a fifteen-pound weight sitting on my chest.
On some days, that’s the cat waking me up
by drooling directly into my open mouth.
Other days, there’s no cat but the weight
persists. I know that the electric filament
that tells me when you’ve entered a room
is imaginary, like the hoofbeats I hear
when the dancers polska in the hall.
I love the filament and I never want it
to break, even when I have to pretend
that it’s not a complete reorganization
of my autonomic system. An amputee
sat on a park bench with his own bones
in his lap, and while this did not violate
laws of public decency, it was unsettling.
Scientists are discovering that most stars
in our galaxy belong to orbiting pairs,
so it’s likely our sun was once a twin.
For most of Western history, we believed
that the Earth was the center of everything
but I know in the middle of it all is a fiddle.
I have to believe you feel these things too.
Nothing here is real but all of it is true.