You may find me speaking words in public
That only you can hear the secret compartments inside of.
I’m floating out tiny craft to you
Whose hulls hold cargo I don’t have any insight into.
Until it’s a conversation that I physically steward
But only happens between you
And something independent inside me,
Some rogue ambassador of mine
Standing with his signal-flags inside turrets
Deemed off-limits to their king.
When I say you I really mean she or her,
Because that’s all that seems to matter.
Wondering at a woman’s reported laugh
That crosses the finish line faster
Than the lazy chuckle she’d give to
Some other man.
What does it mean? And I fit inside “it,”
I’m included like a small curved loop
In the corner of the hieroglyph.
But I suppose it is like the three-way argument
Between scribe, papyrus, and scholar,
Which one party doesn’t know he’s excluded from.
Maybe better never to transcend your dumb self,
Never to translate, never to know
What’s there, flickering like a powerful ghost
Inside your own speech,
Invisible to you,
But plain as sunlight to her.