Motion Sickness

There is a woman in Munich

whose damaged brain knows life

as a sequence of still photographs

changing stroboscopically – a cup overflows

while the just tipped teapot lingers

in her mind; distant cars

at the end of the street

suddenly are upon her – edges

of overlapping instants

no longer fit together:

It’s all a fractured dream

 

– as it must be

for those in boxcars

who left their homes

only a moment ago.

Harvey Shepard is a professor emeritus of physics
at the University of New Hampshire.