They do not teach you

to pull the remaining sweetness from the air, 

hold it to the softest part of your body, the tufted end of a French braid,

parted with a blue plastic comb.  

Teach you to see the rising sun 

as nothing more than a bleed in the white-bellied sky,

to spend millennia in contemplation, bite down on 4x4 acrylic disc,

pretend it compares to the fear of losing this.  

This matriarch of inanimate plasma daughters, 

their celestial mothers, a velvet bag of artificial gemstones.  

The hard helium of the stars backs, pinpricked with dive-marks

from where I’ve swam under a silver surface, the iris of a small God. 

The shutters are always closed now, but chimes of each hour make their way through,

personal as a touch, a hand on the small of my back. These waters,

how many have waded through? How many have not? 

I have felt how the end begins to ache, and this shoreline is freckled with ghosts,

a bloodless prism, cut open to a blackened diamond.

I see. I breathe. I touch a golden vein running through, 

strata in sedimentary rock. I’ve jumped rope with that vein, 

circled it around my wrist, tied it to a Chinese lantern, 

let it billow as smoke, filling the earth’s cavern, a soft-footed mantle.  

I bury myself in a writhing nest of promising young minds, try to find myself in one,

sift through timeless faces— the eyes all newspaper clippings,

transcribed tongues in my silent garden.