Today's poem is by Kate Partridge

Fanfare for the Dinosaurs, or, The Trumpeter
        Agnes Martin, Untitled (Innocence)

As if I had done a thing to deserve it—this delight
                —the afternoon air is
filled, not only with the usual clatter of mountain spring
                        —the paving trucks dragging
                their stomachs along the newly-milled curb like seals heading up

the beach, the nickel hail flipping across the aluminum
                porch's broad sun hat—but
with the blowing of a young trumpeter who, by afternoon,
                        has already worn right through
                someone in the house and finds herself rehearsing in the yard.

Nothing is ejected from my walls—not railroad spikes, antlers
                found prone, stone fragments printed
with fossilized ferns. For Agnes, innocence is six pale bars.
                        She is always wearing stripes,
                which leads one to wonder whether the work influenced the shirts

or the other way around. The one woman in the English royal trumpeting
                corps wears a coat resembling
a pile of rugs. Some things are not worth it. The trumpet has no
                        particular location
                to speak of—not like the next-door Post-it entreating us

to please return the rake. She takes us all with her into the
                air. She knows three entire
songs. One is a fanfare. I am hoping it provides a general good, as it
                        has already done for me.
                Not far from here is a hillside where people figured out that standing between two

rocks could project their sounds in a perfect acoustic balance,
                suggesting, as we like to
believe, that things were made with our weird little voices in mind,
                        and just below are the foot-
                prints of dinosaurs who hiked straight up the hill's face. Touching them

did not make them seem more real. They remained, in my mind, like some-
                thing printed from a textbook
image, too precise with their curving toes to be so antique.
                        The trumpeter forever
                returns to her calling card—the theme from Jurassic Park.

This is not an adventure park, unless you count the ducks who
                like to leave their enclosure
and take to the sidewalk in protest. They are insecure or
                        unsecured. The trumpeter,
                maybe, is seeding us all with little bulbs of rebellion,

the music entering our habits like misplaced grenades. A
                balloon you've forgotten that
pops at the top of the staircase in the night. No one's measured
                        stripes fall outside the range of
                the comets. The white horse, the trumpet are just the first signs.

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Copyright © 2024 Kate Partridge All rights reserved
from THINE
Tupelo Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission