I love the illustrated medical books
where you can remove the transparencies:

epidermis, muscles, vital organs,
endocrine system, the upside-down
movie-screen that hangs on two ropes

in the back of the eye, the skeleton,
until there's just a crude black outline,
empty as a child's résumé. I was pleading

under the eve of the chemistry building,
when someone sapped the lightning
bivouacked in the clouds, burnt

the construction paper moon, font size
of the rain lessening, until I could barely say,
please don't leave, don't leave, don't.

Sometimes the silence lasts too long
until I'm as empty as that field
by the high school, used for nothing,

but mowed so religiously in the summer.
Then the noise comes back, I watch a plane draw
a chalk line in the sky for God to cross

if he were really here, but the God of jealousy
and wrath must have floated off
in some globular lightning storm to another

universe. In middle-school the science
teacher would put up the transparency
of the orbits of the planets,
a big black finger coming in to flip away the earth.

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