“I Reject All Likeness . . . ”

The first shock must have been when the neighbor

said he felt the same thing. A chill upon waking,

an irritation, a sickness at being so well thought of,

when all he wanted was to be solitary, as if I were

a single stem in a thimble of soil and the single leaf

that appeared on the first sunny morning would be

forever green, forever itself, devouring the flower

before it formed, until it bloated and pulled the thimble

of soil up into itself and then became a sphere

without angles or edges, a world that floated away,

hawks and crows careening away from it, the half-

drizzle, half-hail from a thunderhead falling not on it

but around it, so that it moved in its own airless

bubble drawn upward to the stars, where it disappeared.