for Ryan Wilson
It slivers in the corner of my eye,
steel-blue and gray. Your poems leap at the ceiling.
I shriek. It’s 2:00 am. The unconcealing
lamplight adumbrates the bed where I
shrink from the silverfish’s undersea
emergence, the furred slick of it, the face’s
scissory mandibles, whose look effaces
identities I do not want to see.
The maker’s brain is bristling with surprises.
I throw the book at it like something evil,
and keep on reading—semblable, frère, coeval—
to watch as what your lines have captured rises
again, a shiver from stranger worlds, obscene,
alive, that seen once, cannot be unseen.