As If Galvanic

As soon as I sweep, the thrashers put the leaves back
where they prefer them,
millipedes scattered, earwigs
             applying their calipers to gravity.
I leave a minute and the red skink enters my chair,
             an articulated sunset drawn down from the trees.
I sit only to be an Indy of flies,
             a galaxy famous only to oneself.

The minute depth was invented things began falling,
             blue light in the ocean,
the ideas of who we were, sky into the skin of book pages,
             whispers heavier than rain.
Around me the raw material, heat-induced, slippery,
             the mapping gnats, the dry and polished swallows
that cleave or shatter off like electrons.
             All this is drawn silently together,
though nothing like cellophane with its sounds
of electricity's sophisticated wrecks,
             nothing like magnets' spinning and clicking little dogs.

Copyright © 2004 Allan Peterson All rights reserved
from Beloit Poetry Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission