You dream your feet are tender and cold and bare. It is winter. You wear an ember-colored blouse. Someone is reading poetry. It isn't like you to take off your shoes like this.

(Prism, nacre, calcite, aragonite, abalone, mother-of-pearl, spiral, whorl.)

Coin ricochets down in a metallic clatter, ropes shudder and creak, velvet shimmies up, and you slow dance in your clear glass fishbowl with your eyes closed. Center page for eight minutes, all languorous swirl and trope: sequin scales' illusion, allusive fan of silk sleeves. Idee fixe with nowhere else to go.

At night, you shut the blinds against late afternoon's too-early dark. You want to hold all the light inside. You don't want to become a silver top unspun. You don't want to be unribboned.

(Prism, nacre, calcite, aragonite, abalone, mother-of-pearl, spiral, whorl.)

Wait for morning, wait for the wind to please stop blowing because you are brittle paper palimpsest with words you can't quite make out pressed down by a too-hard pencil on a torn-away top sheet: vastuary? unrinded? bromeliaphilia? n-ache-r? Wait for morning, wait for the wind to please stop blowing, wait for your chest to unclench enough to take another breath, wait for the weak-tea November light to come and lick the stubble fields into a quiet burnishing.

(Prism, nacre, calcite, aragonite, abalone, mother-of-pearl, spiral, whorl.)

I cannot speak of the beauty of your words---I was led here by the posting of the Octopus poem on a food/cooking site.

Your number-machine says "number of visitors"---as if the vast horde were composed of singletons with one peep per person, not allowing, perhaps, for those who have seen and return time and again.

I know that I will be lured back, and I know that Borders will see me tomorrow.

And it's charming that you hoard your glances.

O . . . racheld, thank you!!!