what did i say? you said it's who you are. then, later, when the wall had cracked spiderstyle down the one corner you said it's who you have been. where are you trying to go? your high place, happening place where nothing and everything happens or doesn't. what does it mean to not have expectations? i expect the sun to come up swinging, then i get hooked like a fish in the lip with the moon in my eye. milk-moon blanket over all of it and you have nothing to say. headinyourhands. your irises like lilypads with dark things underneath, growing lungs and legs.
i said i was water and i am. what are you? a book on the shelf pressed with the others, somebody burrowed a hole through the inside of. i had my binoculars, magnifying glass, i was starting a fire. i just wanted to know what you kept in there. i speculated: A Dead Mouse. A Family Of Dead Mouses. A Falcon Feather. A Paper Mask With Dried Leaves. A Bodiless Stretch Of Skin. an extra. a glass fruit. A Handful Of Seeds. a book like a ground, like a room, like a you-sized hole in the universe. a place where so much can stay but no much can grow. a place where trees start from their sweet-seed and stem, but never fruit. aren't you getting hungry?
so our bellies met and the moon tilted and flung itself across the frame of window to the rest of the world. in bed with your book open. two doors away from escape and you stayed, sifted the sand with me for all the little sharp things chiseled smooth with water and time. then two days too late and i turn up in this photo where i remember the play but not the players. the rules to the game that seem ridiculous tinted yellow in place of blue, orange in place of lavender. our half-lit production was the color of a bruise, a star-speckled-garden, the inside of a box. in the glint of sun on saltwater it all seems to be made of paper, plastic, tempera pain mixed on cardboard palettes and watered down. i mixed a runny blue glitter glue to water the paper flowers. a paper-mache moon strung up in the rafters or hanging on a wire from a lamp post, a porous eggshell crust with shallow plaster craters, a new foreign terrain mapped with sticky fingers and some necessary abandon.
on your way out this morning you stepped on a paper bird, the one i liked best in fact, and ran off with one eye and part of a wing smashed to the bottom of your shoe. because i wanted you to notice, and you never even noticed, i looked straight at the sun to temporarily blind myself and said nothing. your plan backfired, made that sharpquick popping sound that terrifies the warmhearted birds in the plum trees, that shakes the neighborhood for a moment, the birds and the girls with our heads in the trees, snapping us out of it. the sun had nothing to say of my performance. one little branch fell, under the weight of some miniature winged thing i never even saw, and you were gone.
.
