Vistas & Byways Spring 2016

  • Welcome
  • Focus
  • Table of Contents
    • Bay Area Stew
    • Fiction
    • Nonfiction
    • Poetry
    • Visual Arts
    • Inside OLLI
    • V&B Forum
  • Contributors
  • Submissions
  • About Us
  • Staff and Contacts
  • Welcome
  • Focus
  • Table of Contents
    • Bay Area Stew
    • Fiction
    • Nonfiction
    • Poetry
    • Visual Arts
    • Inside OLLI
    • V&B Forum
  • Contributors
  • Submissions
  • About Us
  • Staff and Contacts

Picture
photo by Jane Bell Goldstein

Speed
by Richard Simmonds


​The rat ran along the rafters
Red eyes, red heart, red thoughts
He ran in redness all along the rafters
Running red, hungry, yellow teeth showing
Guiding him, moving him along
By their super-sensitivity
Heart beating hard, brain pulsing
Pictures batting against his black beady eyes
Eyes blinking to clear them for more,
More pictures, more ideas
Which penetrate him and carry him along with them
 
He has no volition
No idea where he is running
And what he is racing toward
Through, over, under, around
 
He zooms into the kitchen
Where bags of food
Hang from a line
To be safe from him
An idea alien to him, incomprehensible.
Nothing is safe from him.
He is the king of all things--
The cobra,
The mongoose, the dog, the trap.
Their worlds intersect briefly and rarely.
And he streams by so fast
That he doesn’t notice
The steel-focused eye of the cobra,
Its rising hood and flicking tongue.
The teeth of the dog, the jaws of the trap
 
He can’t notice them
Because he would have to slow down
And he cannot
He flies so fast that he cannot be seen
He’s a smear of motion
Cells moving with so much speed, they merge.

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