the sussuration of S
iffiness of a short I
strength & resilience of an L
scissor snip of a K
silk blouses always
pretending to slide off my shoulders
silk blouses & trousers
I gave away
when I threw off the salaryman slog
& moved to Hawaii
off grid, forty acres of rainforest
rain, mud, feral pigs
rooting outside my windows
the four-thousand meters of silk
inside every silk moth cocoon
I am hallucinating the out of doors
because I am inside until further notice
every window in my house brings me
light, bare trees, snow on the ground
indoors is this ugly aluminum walker
in my lap a book about taking the walks
Henry David Thoreau took . . . Cape Cod
Mt Katahdin, Mt Wachusett . . . nearly
two centuries ago people truly walked
New England out of doors was country
from here to there & yet a farther there
as far as one might walk in a day, a week
a month . . . one day I might be back up
on both of my feet & out of doors
she tells me about a boy who comes to school
filthy — clothes, skin, hair — I mean filthy, she says
I wonder, does he never wash? has he no shower?
no parents? no home? what brings him to school
every day? he’s one of six students in her
“intervention” group, students who are behind
who do not learn, who cannot, she says, learn
the parts of speech, though all of them can speak
they know how to assemble verb, noun, adjective
so in fact they know parts of speech as a dog
knows a hydrant, a cat, its owner, without
giving names to any of them — a dirty silent
boy, who agrees to sit at the group table the day
another boy, the one who misbehaves, is absent
