I have watched it over and over:

the sounds are a groove now

and the motions order themselves in time.

The skateboarder flips her board,

then flips, herself, legs flying up;

the board liberated bolts

for the open water;

the cyclist arrives, umbrella

in hand, his course

describing an arc around

and then into the board

(“whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa”);

the bike wobbles,

the cyclist falls,

and in his last second

plummeting over the embankment

he becomes a black bird;

his umbrella mocks him, drifts up,

a defiant and balletic exclamation.

And last, the tiny splash

hardly seen, and we are Auden’s

horse, going on with our day.

Is it real? Was this a  coincidence

of artlessness and grace born

from art itself--the choreography

of Rube Goldberg and Buster Keaton?

Or did the skateboarder, cyclist

and cameraman sit for hours,

players plotting our confusion?

The membrane between

knowing and feeling thins out

and floats above us like the umbrella,

a dark smudge of implications:

we might be the falling

or the flying, the skateboard

or the splash, and it’s all we can do

now to parse out the grammar

of reality from the prose of deceit.