Clouds thin into form: a hawk pulling a tail of rings -- beads of an abacus, the mathematics of light -- a lengthening spine, snakeskin no longer inhabited. All day I'm giving a name for what isn't there. Yet somewhere we've left our likeness, the hollow shapes of us. Even though the snake has slipped into the shade, the shed skin, deceptively whole, hidden in the sun-flecked grass, remembers what it once held. |