foot: the boy’s blue eyes turned in rapture to what

a parent’s invention makes. A Child’s World,

Millais titled it, but Barratt

stuck a bar of Pears in it and turned

the painting into posters, puzzles, postcards

shipped along with images of English flags

and Maori girls, kaleidoscopic

slow flash photos of bursting

bullets, their shock waves caught and used to improve

British rifle manufacturing.

“We have a perfect right

to take toys and make them into philosophy,”

my friend’s book quotes. “Inasmuch as we have turned

philosophy into toys.”

Look: a bubble of black

wobbles and bursts: explodes the world

to a slick of oil.

The clouds pull back. The boy, damp faced from his fit,

now sleeps. Sunlight holds, refracts him in his nap

as something in my friend’s face

cracks. It wildly opens.

Don’t you want one? something whispers. Don’t you, really?

Last night’s thinnest edge

of dream still wavers, the one where the doctor tells me

I am carrying, but will not tell me what

or when. Black hope rises,

bursts inside me. “It’s an aggravate of sells,” he says—

The world grows thin. My friend packs up the toys and kit,

tapping at her soapy vial.

She shakes up the foam and sticks in the pipe.

A world blows up.

The mother and child float by in it.

Vessels

VESSELS

Shouldn’t it ache, this slit

into the sweet

and salt mix of waters

composing the mussel,

its labial meats

winged open: yellow-

fleshed, black and gray

around the tough

adductor? It hurts

to imagine it, regardless

of the harvester’s

denials, swiveling

his knife to make

the incision: one

dull cyst nicked

from the oyster’s

mantle—its thread of red

gland no bigger

than a seed

of trout roe—pressed

inside this mussel’s

tendered flesh.

Both hosts eased

open with a knife

(as if anything

could be said to be eased

with a knife):

so that one pearl

after another can be

harvested, polished,

added to others

until a single rope is strung

on silk. Linked

by what you think

is pain. Nothing

could be so roughly

handled and yet feel

so little, your pity

turned into part of this

production: you

with your small,

four-chambered heart,

shyness, hungers, envy: what

in you could be so precious

you would cleave

another to keep it

close? Imagine

the weeks it takes to wind

nacre over the red

seed placed at another

heart’s mantle. The mussel

become what no one

wants to:

vessel, caisson, wounded

into making us

the thing we want

to call beautiful.

A Peacock in a Cage

A PEACOCK IN A CAGE

shaking out its corona of tail feathers is like light

glowing in a bulb, a man

dancing inside an elevator: the space

too small to quite contain him, yet

contain him it does; the way a cloud

keeps some portion of the sea inside it or a box