Know you’ve changed, feel as though you have
When life crowns out; where once you would’ve seen
A waxing dotted trace
Meet the world first
Ahead of life, see echelon,
A pecking order. Leave the world
Empty, charged with outlines—magic-
Marker dashed-indexes of everything coveted
And made off with. Leave lighter drained:
Lost, a booklouse cresting
A rhomboid lunula; fall
As a hand blooms
At an edge of a bed as sleeper
Falls into grayscale of slumber.
The hand, the nails, precede the self
Toward sickness, into the crystalline
Of sex. So slip a blade through an avocado half and pit,
Into the palm holding it, and believe
The Romans had it in them. If you're naming names. If
You’re naming name, start with the first
You you knew. Mother is a good one.
But not the true. Go back further with you to
A record kept in lime, the polychronic,
Jaundicing glass, mattress doubling
In weight with time. Your face,
The townspeople trust. Mine, they know by heart—
Stapled around town, in black and white on white,
The bandits, to tarred telephone logs. How else
Is one supposed to know who?
Catch on quick,
Scale past the nails of an other left behind in the cliff face,
Then see, over the edge above you
What look
Like five earth-speckled heirloom carrots
Reaching out to you. Shift to the side.
The sun
Will yellow you. Yellows even now
My photograph, now that I’m older, and they know
Just what to do with me