I watch the clock as of reading a sentence.
The numbers were letters.
The shorthand was a subject, the long hand a predicate,
and the seconds a verb.
We both stared at the ceiling.
I said my eyes feel as if they're inside cups.
Then she said, shall I pour your eyes back into your ears?
Language structures what we see without saying it.
But I began to pull bones from sentences.
And I rearrange the letters into skeletons.
I heard a circle as if it were a clock.
It did not tick, made the sound of an insect.
It was a number in the shape of a cricket.
I opened an envelope addressed to me.
I pulled out a blank sheet of paper, unfolded it.
In the letter-- no message, no sender's name, just whitespace.
I like that you exist, she said.
Like the lowercase i, my body felt present
on a page fitted in a dark suit, white necktie,
and, inside the black dot, a smile.
But it was the way her skin felt as she
dressed into a black outfit, the way her body slipped
into a long dark dress shaped like a shadow.
He picked up a stone, held it to his ear,
shook it like a broken watch.
He opened it.
And inside were small gears shaped like a clock.
I am a skeleton, a sentence too, although like you I am neither
a meaning nor a structure, just silence and a complete thought.
This next one is titled Ats'íísts'in, which is a Diné
word.
It's the word for skeleton.
Below the skull, there is part of a letter shaped like a bone.
But the skull is not a skull.
It is a black dot with white teeth.
And the piece of the letter under it
is not really a bone, rather a dark spine.
This is not the end of language.
When it was alive, it had a rib cage, each rib taken out
by small pincers--
the way strands of eyelash are removed from eyelids.
And the dot used to have eyes, white like two grains of salt.
But they were dissolved by two drops of ink--
the way a letter fades on the page
after many years of reading or how it soaks into a fingerprint
and forgets itself, the way word tries
to breathe inside a closed book, the way
a letter shivers when a page is turned.
Because underneath sound, there is thought,
language, a complete structure.
Within the white coffin of paper,
if you shake it and listen, it will move,
rattle like bones on the page.
Ahéhee.
[APPLAUSE]