Sometimes the world comes to me. Sometimes it goes
away. Today, it's a pitbull on a fire escape; a flayed goat,
eyes still in their sockets, hung from a silver hook
in the butcher's window; the buzzing of a blue bottle
as it enters the flytrap, its azure. Scribble "abundance"
and the day will offer you one list. Scribble "elegy"
and it will offer you another. In the stationers, I buy
magnets and string, thinking of how ravel means
the same thing as unravel, how cleave means both to
sever and to cling. Next door, a man with a finger
missing is selling the cut flowers he wraps in cellophane.
We fall apart quickly as we become. Under the ground,
two trains are passing. The passengers, pressed up
against the glass, face outwards and observe, in the carriage
opposite, their mirror selves passing the other way.
This article originally ran in the December 24, 2008, issue of the magazine.