Down

“Wakefulness the knife-edge under sleep’s sealed flap.”

And so she turns the light back on because she cannot sleep,
ransacks the shelves for a book. And in every poem
or story she reads, she reads not only how but that

substances survive— Nothing is ever lost, only comes back,
a sort of reincarnation: streets, houses, the garden where
she skinned her knees, scratched her forehead from a fall

among the dahlias and the roses. And then, the early
currency of loves and losses, bargains made; the season
when a whole cage full of parakeets they kept

on the porch, perished from disease… There’s more;
such inventory doesn’t cease: like tufted feathers
she finds by the lamp on the bedside table, the ones

that pierce through the close weave of the linens.

In response to small stone (94).