Trompe L'Oeil

after Pere Borrell del Caso’s “Escaping Criticism” (1874)

You should move around more,
says your voice in my head,
says our dog with his ball. Look,
del Caso’s boy climbs right out of his frame,
toes so real you could smell them, eyes
wide with fear or with all outside.
Your eyes, I say to myself, can’t be trusted,
you know. Staring at screens, they’ve turned burn
to bum, darn to dam, stern to stem, and now,
reading a piece on birds, they see omitology.
Extinction science? Well, not yet. Get up and blink.
Get the muse in here. Right out of Plato, a shadow
bird’s charming our cat, eating sun off the wall.
If you drive (heaven help you), you’ll say that a roaring fly
crawls up your rear window and disappears just as a jet
fills your mirror. A poet’s voice whispers, What you notice
is up to you. Another, adept at metaphor,
adds, It could, of course, be the other way around.
So who’s the critic inside? Was God in that cave
with the prisoners? Whoever it is, trompe l'oeil
or not, my sympathy’s with those wide eyes.
Fool me more. I’ll run with that boy.

ξ

Muriel Nelson’s publications include Part Song (Bear Star Press, Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize), and Most Wanted (ByLine Press, Chapbook Award). Nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cortland Review, Four Way Review, Front Porch Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, New American Writing, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, Superstition Review, and several anthologies. She holds master's degrees from the University of Illinois School of Music and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.