The Genius
The genius is busy. She’s staring at a ragged alder leaf
backlit by the setting sun. She sees its complex
simplicity, fractals repeated in varying scale.
The word scale invokes fish and symphonies.
She hears salmon muscling upstream and tastes
the cayenne of the xylophone
amid the low vibration of cello and bass.
She appears to be doing nothing, but only a brain
at rest allows patterns to reveal themselves,
the interface of world and mind its own sublimity.
On the brink of unlocking music and waves,
she is interrupted by people who want to pay her
to achieve something. Oh, the time
they force her to waste saying no, no, no.
Sara Backer is a New England poet who enjoys tramping around in the woods. Her speculative poetry has been recently been published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, Silver Blade, Illumen, Bracken, Allegro (UK), Hermes Poetry Journal (UK), and Shooter Literary Magazine (UK) and is forthcoming in Strange Horizons. Her hybrid chapbook, Bicycle Lotus, won the 2015 Turtle Island Poetry Award. Follow her publications on Twitter @BackerSara or her web site, sarabacker.com.
