On a Sunday afternoon, the Plastic Discus Poet pens a poem on the back of a Frisbee and sends it out into the ages.
It sails up to the sun and out of site for a while, then returns to strike the young man in the forehead, sending him confused and stumbling into the cornfields.
Dazed, he forgets his name, his purpose and the date. The painstakingly arranged pentameter he’s prepared for his next poem disperses in a free-for-all of blank verse.
He dusts himself off, puts out the jazz cigarette he didn’t realize he was smoking and launches a toss still more reckless than the first.
The disc soars like a drunken bird, its errant flight path taking it straight into a tree trunk. The Frisbee drops to the ground but doesn’t stop -- instead it rolls down the hill, picks up steam and kicks up pebbles as it disappears into the valley.
The Frisbee’s owner, following the disc and some strange intuition, dashes after it. His tennis shoes have long since lost their traction, and he slides along the slope, gripping vines and roots to steady his perilous descent.
When he finally spills out onto the base of the hill, the first thing he sees is a canopy of leaves above him, like the dappled beauty of Klimt’s beeches somehow at home here in Kansas.
His Frisbee, too, has come to a halt several dozen feet ahead. It is nestled in the front yard of a small shack by the railroad tracks, guarded by totem poles and multicolored bowling balls mounted in a concrete wall. The totems are made of bone statues resembling see-no-evil, speak-no-evil, hear-no-evil figures, only with additional siblings whose petrified gesticulations forbid a variety of other action verbs, even though their playful faces are more encouraging than dissuasive.
From out of this most unusual yard art steps a man wearing a grey beard and a trucker cap of many colors. He bends to pick up the Frisbee, looks at the younger man still on the ground before him, and waves him into his abode.
The interior of the shack is as sparse as the front lawn is cluttered. A naked bulb hangs over a dining room table. A pair of heavy books with golden pages rests beside the sink, though whether they contain magic spells or telephone numbers is anybody’s guess. The cabin as a whole is dark, but streams of sunlight filter in through little holes in the walls.
The man makes no introduction, nor does he ask for one. He offers his guest a glass of water, then clicks on the miner’s headlamp mounted in his headband and looks at the Frisbee carefully. The Plastic Discus Poet sees that there are runes on the disc, though he can’t make any sense of them.
Meanwhile, the trucker-capped fellow studies the writing using a monocle fashioned from the clear glass bottom of a domestic beer bottle.
“At first I thought it was gibberish, or at best some form of Elvish, but looking through this I can tell it is plain English,” he says, handing the frisbee back to his still bewildered guest.
Once his eyes have adjusted to the dimness of the shack, the Plastic Discus Poet identifies for the first time the source and text of his afternoon reverie. Slowly twirling the disc on his fingers, he sees poems within poems and 'bees within 'bees. Though the poem itself never ends, a portion of it reads:
Once upon a time I bought a Frisbee and it traveled unbelievable speeds across time and never touched the ground only landed on the boughs of trees always bowing to return itself to me the freeness with which it spins and the rays of light it bends like notes in which I hear fragments major ninth chords emanation theories fractals whooper wills and daffodils at peace in the background of my Frisbee’s flight time itself unravels an empty mystery not meaningless just esoteric like the punch line of a Laffy Taffy too sun-faded to read to put it simply you oh Frisbee understand the earth in a kinetic fashion I could never hope to my soul has traveled far like the Frisbee it belongs to and yet seeks to fly beyond this world...
Upon reading this elegiac spin cycle and recognizing it as his own, the Plastic Discus Poet admits out loud that his life is a Frisbee he neither threw nor caught.
He waves a timid goodbye to the man, whose concerned smile suggests he wants to say something but knows it would be wiser not to. As he leaves the hut, however, the young man feels as if a weight has lifted. He looks into his bag and sees it is finally free of Frisbees.
He follows the sound of trickling water to a stream and hangs the empty bag on a branch overlooking its banks. Then he walks peacefully down the mulberry bush and beer can-lined path to the old tree with a sign that reads:
top photo illustration by david wetzel and mike nolte
bottom photo illustration by jennifer brothers
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