Edgewise

zoom out, he can be found at the perimeter:do you see the arch of curious & calloused paws?

the keystone gleaming green & found to the desert airis a dusty jagged puzzle-piece emerald,shrapnel from some hooligans’ jettisoned heineken,

his is the gritty business of recovering gems:scouring, salvaging, appraising, the tedious field

work of raising fossils from the dead & urging themto glimmer through a second less consequential life...

eyes scan the stretch ahead of soil yet uncharted,unaware that this is the start of a prolific career

in tending toward, pacing the boundaries of,known venture, of inquiry permissible & possible.

another archaeologist, (brilliant, odd, disturbed),works adjacent, cloaked beneath her straight severedark hair, it sits like a lampshade & she crouches

to examine a new shard specimen poking throughthe steppe’s dust like a skeletal hand,

she seeks the same precious discards,& taken by this calling the two proceed,

pockets clanking with the day’s yield yetlike chain gang shackles: kindred in their quest,both know that at its core this task —

to repurpose what may surface from the past —is solitary work, at times requires parts of the selfonly known to the self, and so on they go digging,

restoring, engaging one another as astronauts merefeet apart read lips, mime mute, fumble meaning throughballoon-man hands where sound has no viable mode.

when mom discovered the sloshing wampum stash,she admonished me not to pick up broken glass,sanitation & general decency & “you don’t know where that’s been,”

etc. etc., the general mom arguments, not to mentionthe danger of sharp edges, even went so far as to make it a rule:Do not pick up broken glass.

I found this prohibition cruel and pointless,to begrudge a thing its unknown past, unjust,

and I thus began anew my glass rescue with allthe furtive righteousness of the underground railroad,

sequestering the spoils under clutter in my nightstand,far from the routine purview of authority,

until days later, reclined in an evening bath,shaping sheen hedges from the bubbles,

I heard her find it; the dim roar of an opening drawer,the pause of a recourse processed, footstepstoward the bathroom door, I knew I couldn’t bear the

scolding much less the disappointment so I madequick resolve to drown the senses, sank back into the

suds of my soapy opal topiary, a pirate sinkingsure with the loot of his ship,submerged safe and deaf on the floor of the sea.