Against the Skin -- Lisa Bourbeau

A trysting place of walls, the perfect marginal--
white possessed of white, all clarity

caught up by measurement and held, suspended
like the almost written word, or dust

the window captures in a shaft of light, displays...
Untouchable. A harvest of impermanence,

and more, this always borrowing a name for it,
as if in dust, or light, or even window rooms

opened into rooms and those, more rooms until
the eye had met the other eye, and hands,

intended reach. Division by parallel--
a battlefield, where capillaries on alert

entrench, and in among the covetous
and coveting, definition become sword

unsheathes to seize the sweated verb
-- to love (as if around the struggle

to be seamless there were not a gilded
frame.) Heft of bone, limbed tongue, wing

structure, foot: which address was laid claim to
by whom, and to whom, squatter's rights? Dust

captive in the slitted light might tell
a different point of view, and yet

the point of telling's addled
by the frequency with which the light's

displaced... To build a monument to
that which we add to each other, the almost

written word stakes claim, and claim
again, between which a comma

arches its back against significance,
it's tail swung up to draw first blood.