to steal from beauty

don't worry. i did finally remember that i'm small. that i might rest just behind fingernails
curled into that pink clam. those thousand licorice-coil tendrils of the brain
which i presumably posess.

i already remembered so i didn't need to take these words from you.
but this is what little animals do: we borrow. and maybe it was you that gave me the courage
to be a small animal.

and look. nana 'b 'oozoo: you are small too. hairline-dweller.
and to me now because we are so sealed alongside walls as nothing as dying and because of
where you flutter in between my eyes and everything i know
here you are large too.

fool. nana 'b 'oozoo. still you enter and depart whisper-good because there is nothing more
or less than you. than i. only the pulse of hand-over-hand
of abrupt little scratches in birchbark and in folded dough.
because generations collect in the knobs of trees and in baskets and in crickbeds and in teacups.
because poetry doesn't change the soggy sky from a perfume of ice and birdscream.
the stories we tell and the bread we bake only fill other bellies same as ours
and we never reconcile with abstraction
but tuck ourselves away on ordinary days like pocket handkerchiefs. we'll never be more
or less than this.