The April Heat (Scooping slimy algae off the underside of a boat,
slick soft.) The sight of a boy beating his wings above the water.
(The lapping water, the cutting sun.) Wings, sick, slicing the air.
Being beaten. (The hand dipping down beneath the surface to touch
my face.) How is a mirror like a shield? (The sun turns the water
living green.) A shield reflects light. (The moon is a shield.)
A knife 刀 is just a thing that makes division 分. (The sun,
from a genetic point of view, is one of the largest knives,
as it creates displacements in the tides.) The something-tides*,
he explains. In the living room, he asks: what’s it like to live
in the shallows? (Where he could reach in and grab me by the shoulders
and divide me from the water. Those 力 powerful wings.) It feels terrible
paralytic. On the rocks, he can see it all laid out as a flat plane.
This maze of coral in the tide pool: does it create, as it creates a maze?
Or does it destroy an otherwise solid body of water? Or does it liberate the rock
from solidity? The living room overlooks the sea. I can agree that a cut
is the creation of a division, and the disruption of a nucleotide is the same
as the creation of a new sequence of nucleotides. But why is power so tied
to hurt 伤? Why is beating the only way to fly 飞?
My separation from the nearby tide pool—an unlodging—is it a division?
Or a creation? His wing beats answer in the other room:
disease (飞), disease (疒), disease (力), disease (伤).