Then one day the earth shucked itself and quivered clear animal.
The pain, the stiff awfulness of life, remained but I walked through a spring wherein every shape that could be named could mean.
The Elephant Ear unwhorled its clamshelled jade…
Cam, the large gay dad from Modern Family, poured matador duende into the Lion King…
The double plum’s ecstatic grail revealed its title in “The Library of Babel”…
And, by way of Vindication, a chickadee existed in the spruce as if to say:
Axaxaxas mlö. To speak is to fall into tautology but today it’s obvious
I mistook for nonsense the most elegant hope.
Note: Several phrases in this poem are borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel,” as translated by Andrew Hurley.