Dry Wood

Can it either open or close, or both? Does it have hands?
Can it be both large and small, like my childhood
feverish vision? I held it in my mouth, whatever it was;
the sameness of both sizes. Closed hands on a rock, a
fly, one strip of grass.
Can its waves cross the desk and touch me?
My father glued it to a rock
along with a few seashells like little buttons,
looked at his watch in the wind.
In doing that, he opened it, and he closed it.
His hands occurred and then died, while
the ocean indifferently watched them
with its mustache and crew socks.
Back to etiquette.
Bow to the forehead of time, seagull, swinging
through the snow like a block on a rope.
The beach turned flat and regarded its people;
they were invisible and sat cross-legged like monks; they drank
glasses of milk like Stonehenge;
they prayed to the sand.
In their eyes, colors were flushed down the
toilets of their brains, remembering quietly the childhood
they had apart from themselves;
how often does a brain consent to something so outlandish?
It talks to the ax, it reiterates nonsense like facts, it kisses doom on the prick.
The forest on the outskirts stands upright and steady as a priest.
Clues received in the information of it all—cannot
possibly be read…
the glass rainbows, the prism interred.