I believe in Trapezoidal Magic.
The ophthalmologist Ames
must have had a showman’s
heart to construct a room
whose walls are not perpendicular
but slanted, and the ceiling
and the floor incline so the world
we see through the peephole
makes a dwarf and a giant
of the same man, and a ball
rolls seemingly upward
in its groove. Or a key floats by
or a playing card grows
like the moony faces of the birds
in the high windows in the warehouses
faraway on Algiers, on floats waiting
out the flood, awaiting their parade.

A piece of paper slips out of one
of the textbooks at the quiet end
of the day, a whoosh to the floor,
and I can see a tagger’s clown
hugging the same axis as his version
of the Mad Hatter. He has the eyes
right. But nothing as elegant
as Burton’s Wonderland’s
Terence walking back into
a memory with a battlefield sky,
Alice scrambling on his hat brim,
Terrance saying, He left it dead,
and with its head, he came
galumphing back. Johnny Depp knows
you can’t get there by falling.
You can’t get there by feel.
He amazons her, the girl
the size of his ear.