Words

I see words every day.
As long as I’ve lived,
every day is a revelation

and a poem’s just an arm’s reach away.

But nobody told me my arm would grow
and grow
with every passing day.

What I could once easily grab
is now… in many ways, like a pale,
starlike oddity drifting out of reach

of an overambitious child. A school of
multihued fish flutters between him
and it. It glows blue and gray as if

it is the pale light borne of ocean deeps.
It is the texture of whale cries and it is the cobalt
flavor of fleshy cacao dipped in rainwater.

The words I see are sometimes written
in languages I can’t read just yet.
The illegible exoticism of circles and

fractured lines are a spectral monsoon
upon the crackling wastelands of
imagination. I’ll recycle

my life from cotton, over and over;
to steel shocks,
to rain-soaked light

and starry water, to the
crinkled cries of mammals
and the milkiness of silk,

and one day, to air. My life will inhabit lungs
billowing
within the dense, echoing hollow places
between my words and yours.