Wednesday, October 18, 2006

four legs on the ground

In a kind of personal and poetic archaeology, I was rifling through my box of poems-in-progress when I unearthed this fragment, cut and pasted from an unknown on-line source:

If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

And two days later, I can't stop returning to the idea that there's meaning in something as incidental as a pigeon-stained statue in the park, something as profound as the precise circumstances of a person's death.

Is there this kind of code in everything I see, I wonder? A layer that I've missed somehow?

I've been watching a lot of Antiques Roadshow of late and see a lot of these missed cues (people owning beautiful and rare objects that they relegate to their damp, 70s basements or use in relation to their dogs, who enjoy rolling in dead things above all else).

I watch the show to see what is possible, what can be crafted out of nothing, but I'm finding the vagueness and the banality of the people who own the objects harder and harder to take.

It's terribly snobbish of me, but there it is.

(Four legs good, two legs bad.)

3 comments:

Brenda Schmidt said...

I have two legs.

Tracy Hamon said...

If you write a post and you have both feet on the floor, this is good. If you write a post with both under you, this is bad (one foot will fall asleep).

Ariel Gordon said...

Pins and needles, knees and toes, knees and toes, knees and toes, pins and needles, knees and toes, eyes ears mouth and nose...