My life on the head of a pin The color of burnt sugar An accumulation of cinnamon Blowing through a yellow kitchen Mother's laundry song Humming lawnmower Lawnmower Green sounds all around All the green sounds becoming brown Fingers scarred by heavy tools Left burning in the dirt The heat of the white silk sun The smell of mystery and nature Ground down to a piece of pocket resin Left turning in the haze of diesel vapor A world within a fleck of spittle My biology my water forgotten Yet thick as a warm spill of wax Small and grey beneath my nails To be removed on a warm stone evening With limes and water on the porch Beneath some rare acetylene shower sky In a cool dark corner there is an antique Bookshelf rubbed black With oil from Japan and the oil of our hands I have collected green tea stains And torn bandages Touched your image I have broken the red clay Masks that gave us faces When we were ghosts I can not release these photographs Or turn them over Look at them again