none of the schoolchildren could explain
they opened their eyes into circles
they found the desks pushed against the walls
when they walked in the schoolroom’s door
and on the old rutted wood
near the center of the room
—they saw a single pearl
the giant’s heart is
at fault in the fault
my father at his desk, looking up:
there is no difference in this
language between
the definite article and the indefinite
“The” or “A”—there is no way to tell
he started crying
“And it’s the first word written down here on the page”
holding up a page marked by a
musical note
Olin cleaning the chair’s glasses with the end
of his shirt and then kissing him
I stood in the room, reading
the old book, a cut on my finger
left my fingerprint in
blood
on the page
A whale sounds down in the ocean.
Eye as small as a foal’s. I know
he sees me watching him
the white whale. There is a tarred
rope tangled around him, but
it does not slow his descent.
Placid as ice as it forms
within the element of its
own composition.
There is a man in the mouth.
That man is me.
I was glad to be hungover when the sun woke me up. There is no doubt the hangover is real—except when I try to explain it to myself. I drank, I walked home, I read. I had many dreams that I dreamed. And now I have this pain behind my eyes, it has a shape, a circle or an orb, it isn’t large—this pearl that is the pain in my mind.