Try again. Embroider the earth’s arc of belly rising
to fold into mountain. If you lay your head table-side,
a stream trickles out, over rocks, into lunar heights.
Right here beside you. The sheen of a screen replays
distant ringing from a lime green phone, 1950.
It is your mother before she became.
Then a school girl in college clothing.
The floor tiles buckle with sprouting weeds we seeded
with sleep. We stood in the room’s disintegration,
matter apart—shapeless scenes apiece, looking for form.
Mockingbird nests in the paisley fabric
our scientists embroider with wormholes, ideas
melting with the walls into hair. We are all
separate flesh, sleeker atoms to become parallel people.
We blend with the desks before us, our writing utensils
tuning to forks with fingers, words turning out pupils
of stars on the hunt for dark matter.
Keyboards and dust sponge like doorknobs.
Wood grains in floors become paintings of carpet fibers,
dust mites and personal. We part like walls with zippers
over eyelids to pass through portals called doors.
They smile when we reach with our minds
to turn handles, yielding keyboards from the piano next door.
No navel in the previous mountain sheds
its boney clothes before us. We are as equal
as the ghost birds holy forever scarred songs, aloud ahead.