To Capture Running Water in a Bucket
Jim Davis

The strawberry I eat is food, on the vine it’s fruit,
garbage in the bin but lying on the floor
where my sleep-numb fingers left it, it’s a future
I author as I try to remember the last time I swept.
How could high school girls possibly enjoy
a poem about belief in the suspension of dis-
ambiguation & cotton balls marred with eye
liner? Polka wakes the neighbor writing poems
to the machine, sounds like a demon’s sermon
from a mounted horse, chewing cinnamon & cud
on the hill of one thousand years—in the mirror
of a mirror there is everything: language braided
in boundless layers. White suns painted on red
dresses, dolls full of dolls full of strawberry blood.

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