i

A book isn’t a body
because it can be returned.

Pages of rooms
we never entered:
moloko milk bars,
goblin fruit markets,
ships bearing four-armed poets,
flat countries where lines
can’t imagine being lifted.

In the hallways,
the cemeteries,
the parking lots,
in the labyrinthine elevator system,
we traveled without arriving.

At the airport lactation station,
you said you wanted me to have it
when you were finished,
and then you were finished,
and then I had it.

Exchange means
one person keeps one thing,
one person keeps something else,
and neither can prove
who has borrowed what.

ii

“We can’t see the whole thing,”
because if you’re standing in Flatland,
looking at a circle,
you can be correct about the circle
and wrong about the object.

The circle is real,
just not the whole shape.

The wound is real,
the longing and the absence are real –-
the story you’re currently
telling yourself may even be real.

But none of these things
guarantees that you’ve 
apprehended the entire
geometry.

The possibility exists
that there are corners,
that there are dimensions
you haven’t yet perceived –-

that “otherwise”
might be a direction.