Bright Blue Self-Portrait

I thank the spiders’ webs and the circus dancers who stain our eyes with

Rapid movements and authorize our handcuffs to make no distinction

Between night and day or love and hate.

No one will know the sum of our arduous daily separations from bed to

Work. These pillars actually belong to you since I have not counted them

Or know any more than you do where they are or in what country they

Still exist. We can put all our concerns into a loaf of bread and French

Kisses, go to movies and watch the splashing milk on the screen imitate

the forest in the moonlight. Why all the fuss about the patrons becoming

Feathers, discharging their ideas of nobility on the evening news? There

Are no lights in the theater just soft snow from the balcony that is the

Little red schoolhouse where all this began.

Actually it was because of you I did not attend as often as I should have.

I was too embarrassed to face you across the clay modeling tables since I

Always felt like the clay in your hands was a cartoon version of my teen

Years, dear slippery-fish ladies of the sleepy west.

Don’t forget, my early life will be yours, too,

With its self-descriptions of poetic justice,

The tiny creatures we write about can describe themselves in the moss

We leave behind.