When you leave the place you will only later call home, you become, rather suddenly, though you might not know it for quite some time,
like a fish without scales, the naked diamonds of its puckered skin flashing their ascent from the bottom to the air-choked top,
like a flock of birds with pebble-filled bones—though the stones themselves may be quite lovely, the birds will plummet toward the ground as if they had suddenly fallen in love with it. Once there, they will embrace it, wings wide and necks crooked in touchingly naive surprise,
like an eye leaking water, its strangely beautiful circles of color buckling. One crack, two cracks, and it is a flap of spent cells, no longer an eye,
like a moth flying more and more erratically, aiming for the obscene head of a flower and hitting the stem instead, an oval of its wing dust ground into the finger pad of a human,
like two hands of fingers, nails extracted—they carry a sense of bereavement times ten and they cannot catch fine and shrinking things,
like a tiny country that can find itself on no map or atlas. It wonders, was it a dream? Those years of living and naming and fighting and crying. And the tales we tell of our headdresses and the ways we sing ourselves to sleep.
like a river damned, swelling like a goiter, watching its sickly abdomen trail out the other side, raging under the pressure of itself upon itself, wishing for a pin a tooth an awl a tiny hole an eyelash crack,
like a fish, scaled.
But the news is not all bad. Though you cannot rescale yourself, though you cannot go home, you may never know yourself better than when you are about to float, white on a dark streak of lake, breathing like a beast.