Because I know how to count,

the clouds occur to me as numbers.

Coursing over the blue gums & the housebarns.

Condensing into bundles. Algebraic structures.

Helplessly attuned to movement, those whose

shapes I can make sense of become like friends to me,

forming colors on the horizon, tearing a hole

in the idea of color, color it is possible Paul Klee

painted most beautifully in pieces like “Fish Magic”

or “Flower Myth,” where scale is all but obliterated,

traded out for the fancies of the eye, birds the same size

as the moon, a sunflower where the sun should be,

the buildings devolving into lines of elementary

geometry in sketches like “Death for the Idea.”

Because I belong to a brain, each fox floundering

for a squirrel, each windmill, each protein

lines up squarely behind its name. Conspiring

together as sentences, they have served me

well in the symposiums, at the edges of hospital beds,

lingering like a stain on the mind, standing one step

behind the things they stand for, shadows or stalkers,

blotches on a photograph taken against the daylight,

a way to have the world & eat it too, making it so

there is always plenty to see even after I blink,

even after I lower the blinds.