Listen and
Silent have

The same
Letters.

What’s up
With that?

I am assembling
a new gray tweed
suit. The plodding,

solitary elephant is
wandering on a dark
road. I am not an I.

Pinocchio is missing
an arm and speeding
in a big truck. I am

an eye that floats
overhead, smaller
than a pin-point,

nothing really.
In the murky
night Pinocchio

hurtles toward the
idle elephant, but
swerves at the last

moment, then I’m
wearing the tweed
suit, even though

it’s missing a
sleeve, and all three
of its ivory buttons.

In the foreground, a
child’s marble, made of
clear glass, incandescent,
aglow with blue and
green streaks and swirls,
on a table cloth the color
of the ocean on a
bright day, and in the
background, a window,
the inky night sky, the
luminous but gray moon,
smaller than the marble,
flat, distant, and in
the glass, an adult’s
face faintly reflected,
small, ghost-like, colorless,
embedded in the
starless black space.

Who knew there
are so many
poets—lurking

in the shadows,
walking in the
sunlight, running

naked on the
beach, or sleeping
in defunct malls?

The wind-up
clock chimes

from the other
room. On the

wall, a painting
of a landscape

five-thousand
miles away.

The room
illuminated

by lamp-light,
as if it were

the middle of a
long dark night.

Dried, faded
red carnations
on an electric
blue tabletop,

a dark green
avocado sliced
open, revealing
the inner canary-

yellow flesh and
sienna-brown
seed, and in
the foreground

a child’s doll,
prone, naked,
generic-beige
plastic skin, an

impossible figure
of a woman, all
rendered in an
even, flat lighting.

Gulls are crying
just outside my

window, as I

construct a ship
in a bottle.