The Self

The self
can not make sense of the world.
Clouds share particles
and begin indistinctly. Sound
is, of course, spatial.
Behind me, your fingers count my summer
freckles
like an infinite lawn of stars,
a blank page crawling
with punctuation
that is still becoming exact.
There are always other ways to connect
the dots: we are each
a metaphrase still being written.

Except in brief moments
of silence,
the self does not exist.

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Note: "infinite lawn of stars" is a reference to "The Infinite Lawn", a chapter in Italo Calvino's book Mr. Palomar. Calvino uses lawns (collections of blades of grass) and galaxies (collections of stars) to explore the question Peter Unger introduces in his essay "The Problem of the Many". Unger uses clouds of particles to illustrate this philosophical problem.