Words which are boxes, each a watercolor painting
stacked for moving.
A woman with a bird for a head.
A downpour of ink strokes
of image becoming idea, becoming noise,
becoming background.
Somewhere between the foreground
and the background is the whole story.
That is the floating world.
There you are, complete, this indivisible space
away from me. I see you.
In the floating world, some versions of us
can touch.
Are touching.

 

Cures for Loneliness


do not work. But we keep
inventing them. My father ties a sail to a bicycle,
he plans to circumnavigate the old Confederacy. My sister
asks me for the rainbow.
She wants to tie it in knots, over and over, thousands of times,
into a big tangle she can crawl inside.
She is cold with loneliness.

When I was a teenager I had a whole world in a paper brick.
I would sit on the brick and meditate on my loneliness.
I never thought, in that paper brick were a thousand
other lonely girls, and in that grassy battlefield I see
my father sailing over, a dozen lonely girls at least
lie watching quietly, and even that rainbow
I bought on sale, even its red root that I put separately

into the mail for my sister, to begin her compulsive knotting,

even it must have as many lonely people as contented
spun up within it, or their hair.
And each little envelope sent from a war zone
with “free mail” written in the corner—
I unfold you—ruinous origami.
The future is made of paper,
enough to crush us.

 

 

Floating Foundation


It should be a series of abstract
paintings—ultrasounds, chat sessions,
emails, phone calls with poor clarity.
So much black and white noise, inaccessibility.
How much we have invested
in a structure built on so little—a high rise
founded on loose packed river silt.
The imagination drives itself
in a lattice of steel rods
to keep the whole reality aloft.
Crystalline, neck-craning, busy.
The _____ stands in for what
is not there.