If we hadn’t been lonely, could we have sensed,
both underwater and in air, the tendencies
of flickering? So many moved that way:
fish, wing, hand, star, branch at sunrise,
branch in water, branch on fire.
We were constant, or felt that our will was,
even as we pulsed and blinked, and it was
our constancy that made us want to enter
smaller things with confidence,
and larger things with fear. So it was easier
to feel more longing for our equals than our gods.
A single snail baffled us. Had it made its shell with its secretions
or had it found itself? And then of course the snail
crept away. But the pearls we strung were lunar, luminous,
tellurian, and still. Draped across a woman’s breast,
they tempered us, who were constantly drawn to sites of sustenance
without the memory of having eaten there, where gradually
we found ourselves most often trembling and wavering and loose.
--Kathleen Peirce, 2004