On YouTube
It’s winter in China and the cranes are dancing, the snow stamped with their joyful triads. On a laptop, I watch as they launch themselves into the air again and again, slowing their return to earth with an unlovely flap of wings. They race back and forth with adolescent brio, large, ungainly, out of their element on the cold white ground, they are ridiculous. They do not care. They mate for life except, like us, for those who don’t, their cries raucous and harsh and they don’t care. And yet, that crimson skin patch, the white feathers that wrap around the back of each ebony neck like preppy upturned collars, that lethal beak, my God, they are handsome. Waders, water birds with long beak, long neck, long legs, they live for forty, for sixty years, except for those who do not. They do not care. Legs trailing, neck extended, flying in V-formation across the Dragon Moon of May, they are magnificent. And they don’t care. A red-crowned crane draws up one leg and tucks her head beneath her wing. Her rivers are dammed, mudflats drying, the salt marshes receding. My screen glows. She sleeps. Tomorrow she will dance. Garnet sets out to write an ekphrastic poem. So why does she wind up with a poem titled "On YouTube," instead of something like "My Visit to the Art Museum's Chinese Exhibit"? Because distractibility is a trait we share, and Garnet, like me, will not be held responsible for being led astray by the internet: My alter ego (a main character can begin to feel like one's twin to the writer, this writer anyway) and I both go to the museum to see a spectacularly beautiful exhibit of Chinese art. Our favorite is a diptych, almost as tall as we are, a painting of two cranes. We go home inspired and sit down to write a poem about that painting, but then . . . YouTube. We just want to learn a little more about these birds, maybe fifteen minutes of online research should do it, right? Five minutes in, we are helplessly in thrall to the internet's siren song. So many videos. So many facts. Such interesting behaviors. The art has ceased to matter. The birds, for better or worse, have become the subject of our poem.
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April 2024
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