you are trying to consider the power of your loom. your vague first appearance at the bow of the boat, your wet fingers curled around the rudder. astronomy is science and mythology. spliced. taped to the sky. is you in the cutout and stucktogether of this room, sugar-breath laced with miniature lemon, the steam of breathing out in the rain. wine-colored leaves kidnapped, pasted to the walls, their nimbled veins reaching like roots. a whale's skeleton suspended overhead, wax paper baggies full of blue-jay feathers. recreating astronomy is only difficult if you leave the room.
all your sharks that circle the puddles downstairs, through windows dashed with rain, are waiting for you to back yourself down the plank. the mailman brings stacks of books, writing magic spells of mail in the margins. your letters never intended to send. your letters are perforated in the folds from rubbing against themselves in your jacket pocket. "just think of giraffes," the mailman said once, through the mail-slot, "whose hearts are over two feet long!" you nibbled leaf-eater biscuits for weeks after that, orphaned, relearning how to swallow. the things are what make the place.
you and you and you and you are talking to yourself again.
admitting that you are a wax apple, a spool collection, a stammer, a time-stop photograph of a woman running. literalizing your metaphors. wagering all you've got for a couple of gretel-crumbs of dreams, so pointed in your project, watching goldfish water fall from the sky, balancing sugared lemon-blossoms between your clean white teeth. reading all your letters over and over, in the dream where all things are relics, where you yourself are an astronomy, your quiet lungs expanding and collapsing like bellows, breathing the uneven pictures of your heart
into your hands
pressing your pulsing letters to the window
.
