I wanted a creature—a bird, perhaps,

or an animal that glides even if it cannot fly,

an ocelot, or a seal, but I got a planet,

maybe because I checked a box beside Creation,

not Creature, and found myself possessing a world.

But not a world, really, or an actual planet,

it turns out, only a moon, and a moon

that has been eaten by a spider, or sawed

in two and left to languish, a closed eye,

a mouth stitched shut, a fossil sand-dollar.

Not a coin I can spend, but a penny worn dark,

a star collapsed. Black ice, a snake’s hideout,

a thought erased, not even a hole that I

could dig deeper for water, or wider

for the planting of a tree—a vaccination mark,

an ear hole without an ear,

a pill you’d put on your tongue only

if you had to fight malaria or a plague,

a pebble you would never notice in the river.

But not a world, not a solar system or

a galaxy: a missing button. And yet this charcoal

is what I slip into my pocket, and this is

what I carry with me as my shadow trails

across the golden afternoon.

And I give it a look often, groping for my keys,

and almost leave it in the tip jar in the crowded deli,

until I begin to see how inadequate it is even

as a metal slug, a drop of licorice,

a flake of iron. Because those days come

when I stop carrying it,

and it forgets to sleep and opens

its stone window. It lets forth a light

that does not suit it, the dark margin

hanging back in sullen shyness, easy to make out

beside the increasing scimitar of

dazzling white. Like a porcelain smile,

the foxed illumination waxes

until there’s nothing left of my whisper,

my almost-world, but a pregnant completeness,

huge over the lake, dazzling over the city,

a soprano who won’t shut up, a glare that

the prism multiplies into every color in the universe,

except the color of the field where fire

has lived, which is the black of first dawn.