PAPER

Smooth as an egg slipping through a hen’s cloaca,
nourishing as bread or milk, integral as bone,

skeleton of everything we write, folded by Japanese
into pleated swans, snipped by school children

into snowflakes, precious as pearls, unstrung,
unworn, cold as Christmas morning in Norway, radiant

as an albino walking down Fourteenth Street
on a July afternoon, transparent as phantom,

alabaster sheet of nothingness, Sartre’s old friend,
tragic as ivory minus its dear pachyderm, addictive

as cocaine, fallible as chalk on a board of equations,
as if numbers could explain the world, as if words

could light the room where a mother sits with her dying
child, pale as her face, waiting for the black ink of dawn.