"It's just one cut,"
said the sharp lady doctor before language
melted off her clipboard and the operating lamps
grew huge and spilled their bright innards into my eyes.

I lay on the cold tiled floor of the museum.
One monstrous cut -- the white shark suspended
above in a last hungry lunge yawns, belly open.
Around me what a wide-eyed fisherman pulled out:
old tires, whale-oil lamps, Damien Hirst, bones upon bones.
Damien sits on a tire, bored as hell. See the jagged edges,
he says, they pulled him into our cold afterlife
and cut while he suffocated, explosive oxygen flooding
his lungs from the wrong direction.

Later, the doctors showed me
what had for so long kicked and screamed to be out.
Liver-colored, swollen, wrapped in catgut, it was not
as expected. Others had promised ground seaglass,
poppyseed freckles, huge lungs like fibrous balloons
for flying or spouting poetry nonstop in day-long stretches.
Where were my eyes?
It was supposed to have my eyes.

You found me staring, hair full of sand:
I had tried to embrace the water as my blood
and was reprimanded by a wave for my daring.
Around us the thick grass like palm-sunday fronds
and the path of boards lifted from a painting
dissolved into steel wool. The rest of the scene
has been redacted, smeared from my mind
with an inky thumb.

You found me between sleep. I am still
waiting to be returned to                       , or
wherever the quarter-light carved your back
into soft photograin beneath my childs hands.
You said, "                                    
                    ", words warming me
with the bloom of a chrysanthemum beneath my chest.
Does the crown of petals still ***** like the cigarettes
off that          balcony, overlooking          ?

I burned my body into your imagined contours.
The space between ours folded over and
again, an origami figure slowly taking on mass and attitude.
It sat on my shoulder, Incan headdress grown solid one day,
stock right foot the next. It cleaved and cleaved.
We joined at                 or maybe                 , in the rain.
Or was it? My face was wet, and hands or moths
fluttered against an aquarium window.
If dreaming, I awoke when                  : the train
flattened its memory like a penny.
Here it is, squashed between my fingers. The face pushed
like putty, smoothed like the faces of               and
              and of course                 , who remains
only as a scratchy, juvenile voice.