His brass-plated nickel twists—
a tangled rope looping on itself
         looping around a thumbtack
looping around your throat.

Teardrop gems in brass saucers
fall in jangling rivulets, streams
of crystalline blues. Wrung
from shades of sky, cloudless
summer and midnight indigo,
they shape-shift in shadows
                                    drip—
                         drip—
          dripping from the s-curve
of a bronze body crusted
in blues, blacks, and greens.

A flower is carved under
each jewel, a map of a bird’s nest—
                  a map to a bird’s nest,
           like he might forget in the small,
                  dark hours of the morning where he belongs.

                  Home is not dangling from a bookshelf.
           Through lamplight and sunlight
his stares due west.