Not everything, he said, not everything is dirt.
As though the empty room had challenged him.
He looked around, retreated quickly back
inside his head, a snail’s armor black
as shoe polish, worn smooth by hurt
not worth responding to. Blood on the rim
of the wine glass marred his careful dream
but he went on, undeterred, the scene
assembling in his mind like an ice-blue
pool he’d dive into at sunset, right on cue.
In the clean water of medicated sleep
he moved among the biographies of split personality.
In the high desert air, stormclouds a mile deep,
the blue ecstatic leap of electricity.