plugs palm-fronds into our ears
administers everything the color
of illness. Mother of egg-white;
glossolalia. I am TV screen, antlered
branch-systems. So the I becomes
a faux fur to warm in. Window-bench,
box of stale peppermints. I swallow,
I antelope. I desperate
to identify with everything I look at:
brief sky; brief mother, the minute fiction
of our oneness solidifies
when it places my I onto your I—
I, I’ve come to know, is the essence
of power. Nothing that breathes
is truly faultless, they told us,
and the feather in the fold of your sheets
lit up because of it. Fault is pale knees—
no, a gold flash in the nestling’s buzz
on a day like this: glimmer
me, face of termination. The sun is a rude
cousin with no empathy. But family
is family; the awkward shell
I harbor, crack—avian eyelids,
light, yolk—
and then that window. Slit-white. Arsenic.
I eat, I insurance. And to sustain you,
I tie prayers to peacock
feet, then feed them to the lake.