I Want Your Pail Gone by Sharon Jan
No one would have noticed the tin bucket
on the shelf, how its speckled
contours were rimmed with dust,
or the way a halo of rust settled onto
the pine boards. If only
the sea could fill it again,
with brine and shell shards and its driftwood
cousin, and the gulls could fly above the kelp fields, pressed upward
by transparent forces, into
a sky so expansive
it would cut the rims of their unblinking, avian eyes.
I couldn’t see it myself, the space around
tin or feather. My cells pressed themselves together
like the geodesic arcs of
the Romans, and even radio static riveted
into my silence. I couldn’t have noticed a lonely pail,
nor would I have wanted it—
I realized
its space meant nothing
to me
only its embrace.
