Out of Place

On the taut white bed

the blue-black blue jay’s feather

with lighter blue striations

looks like a neat rip

wormholing to another dimension’s

outer space nebulae as

lithographed over our own,

and the coastal scene

in which the delicate

abandoned hermit crab

shell makes sense

collapses according

to the room’s four walls

that allows me to see

the salt bay through the pine barrens.

What token or memento

beckons of the eyries we clung to

before the leaf-like

letting go, slow

zigzag glide to a

stillness? Whatever it is,

it’s intangible, the line a bird

leaves in the air, or that

the pine will draw.

A bamboo shoot

tilted in a snifter

lowers this island into the water

so it seems that just over the edge—zoom!—

loom the green mists of China.