Camouflage

by Les

i.

This is her excuse for not writing:
Expanse of pillow swallowing words, letters 
curled into themselves too tightly
for growing ligaments. She stretches her limbs,
saliva trailing from the corner of an open
mouth, the fecund gestures of her dreams
multiplying like children. She means to say
that sleep is more erotic than what can be sculpted
by the tongue. Or perhaps it is only that
experience without words is voluptuous.
After all, the body was once mollusk,
intelligent and inarticulate.

ii.

She’s read about a cuttlefish turning the color
of its surroundings, passing for a rock
on the seafloor. Scientists placed it on
a checkerboard. Since it was new to black and white
it mustered only a passable pattern
which was not enough for hiding.
Now it could be seen, plainly outlined
like a text with a standard reading.

The moral was about eloquent ruses
perfected in the natural environment
long before human hands displaced a body,
forced a language, rendered it mute.

iii.

So much goes on in silence, an opacity
beyond the labor of words. She wants to be
where she is meant to be, for her surface
to be a field of glyphs, making the inward
outward. Then her signals would not be
for no one, about nothing.

They would mean the world.