Don’t count on the words you live beside changing:

grief becoming ribbon, tree wolf, cinnamon suitcase

or wealthy or snore or slobber. Because nothing

besides Heaven changes, does it? Only a yellowing sky

from the storm hovering over the sleeping.

Wish for a word like startle—what it might signify

to an animal small as a loaf of bread. How it might shift

in the hovering of words denoting group: a startle of small

children, a startle of girls walking home lonely. Alone,

I meant to say. I meant never to say blossom

or unfolding because a hand will open any number of ways,

to reveal the crescent-moon marks of nails dug in

or a lifeline long and furrowed or a button or a subway token

or a firefly let loose to join the lights pulsing in sync

in the late-night field. That same hand clenched before

history’s stiff lesson—the word I never wished for: fist.

Not raised in protest, and pushed never into mandible or belly.

And not fisting, either, too late, I tried to say

when you professed love in the crowded restaurant.

As if in the closed hand’s lexicon

the clenched body might read flower-of-meat or bud-waiting-

for-rain or anodyne swallowed against the fear of opening.