What We Do Not See

by Martin Steingesser

What We Do Not See
“The task of imagination is to imagine the real.”
Robert Sardello

You believe in it, the light—sunlight, dazzling sun
over a field of wheat, or warming your hand like a glove.

What of the dark of the moon?  What of the other side?
One morning I walk out of a breakfast café, the sun

winter low and bright brushing snowdrifts
rosy bronze.  A few steps from the curb

and I’m down, cars swerving past, a woman screaming.
Was I dreaming?  I don’t remember being airborne,

watching faces pass below, eyes following my flight.
“I thought he was a seagull,” the woman whose car hit me

swore in court weeks later.  What I recall is time vanishing,
car head-on in a sequence of still images, each bigger

than one before, as doubtful as that bird’s-eye view; that
and landing unbruised, seagulls wheeling overhead,

some passerby shouting “I saw you, saw you flying!”