Home >> Volume 6, Issue 01

Translation of a Bathroom Towel

Kathleen Kilcup

As the body
is a transmuting of light
to heat to skin
cells left on a bathroom towel
 
pure conversion of a wound
     into an eye,
          the poem
is a river
run through sand
          and crab to the sea
and back
and back.
 
There is the language of the mouth
          and the letter,
cattle drivers, fingers, midday prayer,
          Glass walls wink and nod.
Scattering, scattering.
 
Translate back several thousand
years, before the tower
 
of Babel, a poem is a memory.