Skill Sets

    1

In the first cartoons
the mutability of forms
was a laugh riot:

bouncing biceps,

one foot growing huge
to stomp a cricket—

and staying that way.

The aye-aye’s
first finger. 

    
     2

It’s one thing to rate pains
on a number scale,

another to judge them 
qualitatively—

aching, stinging
or burning?

Only we can do this

no matter how many
feed-back loops

they put into the machines.

    
     3

Be specific:
include kinks and tics,

a good twinge
in the roots

when the brush is pulled
hard

through time’s 
tangled mess.

Here’s the catch:

you can’t know
you’re in a costume

and also  
be serious

Copyright © 2024 by Rae Armantrout. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 13, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“‘Skill Sets’ may have begun when I was in a doctor’s office answering a question about my pain: Aching? Stinging? Burning? Or it may have started when I saw a photo of a creature called an aye-aye, and it made me think about the way bodies are distorted in classic cartoons. In either case, the subject of bodies runs throughout: what happens to them, and how they are evaluated.”
—Rae Armantrout