Avra Wing
UNTITLED
The Humpty Dumpties sit in a row
in a gallery at the Modern
contemplating pieces
made of bent wheels, rusted cans, rags,
wood scraps, torn cardboard—the world's detritus.
We get the artists' m.o. —
using the discarded to make
something worth looking at—we,
who have had to leave something behind—
parts of our bodies or brains—
and haven't been put back together
quite as pleasingly.
Oddly
the exhibition offers comfort—
beyond the broken can be beautiful.
It's as if I've come upon my own missing pieces,
refashioned into mobile, assemblage and collage,
and— for a jagged moment—
they are not lost after all!
but have found a fitting place—
even gained a certain splendor—
and all the kings horses and all the kings men
have gathered to pay them homage.
* * *
NEONATAL MALADJUSTMENT SYNDROME
These behavioral abnormalities in foals seem to resemble some of the symptoms in
children with autism. –John Madigan, UC Davis veterinary professor
Born too fast, the foal
stumbles toward a corner
and will not nurse.
Not yet of this unquiet world,
it rests inside a dream of the womb:
A failure of transition of consciousness.
And then, a miracle.
A simple rope harness
pressing gently on its body
recreates birth.
In twenty minutes
it wakes and rights itself.
If one hug was all it took
for you to make sense of it all,
you'd no longer need to tiptoe
around us and our noise.
Your flapping hands
would lift you up,
bear you to safe landing in the meadow.
Avra Wing is the author of the novel Angie, I Says, that was made into the
movie Angie. Wing is also the author of the young adult novel, After Isaac,
winner of a Moonbeam Children's Book Awards gold medal. Her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly
Review, Hanging Loose, and New Madrid, among other places. She leads a NY Writers
Coalition workshop at the Center for the Independence of the Disabled New York (CIDNY).
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