Reflection

This poem is part of a cycle within larger project I’m calling [Null Set].  The brackets are a deliberate element of a trope these poems keep leading me back to—the generous use of underscores & em-dashes (why stop at n?) & punctuation & other symbols—for fun.  The larger theme in the project, climate change, is by no means fun, so I’m trying to balance the devastation and abstraction with moments of dark humor and optimism for the world in which I’m raising my children.  There are cycles focusing on wildlife, geology, the inanimate human-made world, along with birds.  This batch tends toward abstraction, with spare and strange imagery meant to evoke suspension and incompleteness.  There are echoes of writers from Yeats (twice that I’m conscious of) to Donne to Pynchon, and no doubt others who escape me.