She was eating a yellow pear wrapped in tissue tinted wan green.
Surgery, she said, had cured her of an addiction
to objects. She described the dull knife
as both exact and imprudent. Now she suffered
slightly from a lulling amnesia. Her recall was jagged,
like topiary cleaved along a zigzag divide.
She was, however, quite sure she’d seen silver fish
caught in the twine of treetops.
Don’t we all come from water? Ham asked.
A mad purple flood
heaving behind some sweet mother breast.
Now she worried the sun had baked her unfit to be kissed.
Bliss, she said, is best viewed through an absence
of terror. Wasn’t drowning similar to sex?
A saltwater embrace
. . .
on a bed of seaweed, green ribbons circling her wrists.
Tapered raindrops in a windless falling.
That flooded city, she said, was foreign to my dearest
fantasy. At the end of the day, there was only a tin voice
giving the overview
of swing lights in the closet of night.