Did you know

an upside-down postage stamp

once meant ‘I love you’ but if the stamp

was of a flag it meant ‘distress’

Even Eliot’s wasteland

would be stuck ape-ing the voice

of police in different pitches

if not for a teacher’s heavy hand

The life of the law has not been logic

it has been experience

Every poem is a half-built bridge. Every poem

is a tower master stacking & restacking

blocks to keep standing a world others

have yet to reach. To read a poem

is to meet Theseus halfway

with a coil of bulbs trailing, each glass globe

a warm heart blinking. Which is to say,

to have read a poem is to have experienced.

After a season of reading law in the jurist’s

chambers, I travel the city every night & replant

its gardens, collecting

unfinished thank-you cards & hardly worn scarves

out of which to fold a palace

of paper parakeets. Far north,

behind a sanctuary of birch, I broke bread

with a king. He’d forgotten his name,

but when I asked to whom he was obliged

for his treasure, he opened his mouth

& there was the sky. In a forest of nightjars,

I learned hundreds of songs to thank stars

but none that they would hear. I once tried

writing a poem long enough to ladder itself

up to space. When I finished,

the world I wanted to understand had already changed.