I wanted a creature—a bird, perhaps,
or an animal that glides even if it cannot fly,
an ocelot, or a seal, but I got a planet,
maybe because I checked a box beside Creation,
not Creature, and found myself possessing a world.
But not a world, really, or an actual planet,
it turns out, only a moon, and a moon
that has been eaten by a spider, or sawed
in two and left to languish, a closed eye,
a mouth stitched shut, a fossil sand-dollar.

Not a coin I can spend, but a penny worn dark,
a star collapsed. Black ice, a snake’s hideout,
a thought erased, not even a hole that I
could dig deeper for water, or wider
for the planting of a tree—a vaccination mark,
an ear hole without an ear,
a pill you’d put on your tongue only
if you had to fight malaria or a plague,
a pebble you would never notice in the river.
But not a world, not a solar system or

a galaxy: a missing button. And yet this charcoal
is what I slip into my pocket, and this is
what I carry with me as my shadow trails
across the golden afternoon.
And I give it a look often, groping for my keys,
and almost leave it in the tip jar in the crowded deli,
until I begin to see how inadequate it is even
as a metal slug, a drop of licorice,

a flake of iron. Because those days come
when I stop carrying it,
and it forgets to sleep and opens
its stone window. It lets forth a light
that does not suit it, the dark margin
hanging back in sullen shyness, easy to make out
beside the increasing scimitar of
dazzling white. Like a porcelain smile,
the foxed illumination waxes
until there’s nothing left of my whisper,
my almost-world, but a pregnant completeness,
huge over the lake, dazzling over the city,

a soprano who won’t shut up, a glare that
the prism multiplies into every color in the universe,
except the color of the field where fire
has lived, which is the black of first dawn.