Opening a saved dictionary from the old barn,
butchered by some angry missionary
or preacher's kid who was mad at God,
taking teenaged fury out on the cover, now gone,
and all words beginning with A,
except those from away to azymous,
sliced fragments of availableness
to avowance, cut to the meticulous binding
at awake, but including axis, Aymara,
and a simple line drawing of Azalea.
Fragments of definitions are falling
while I look up suburb
as a piece of the EQUATOR, without the E
flutters down in four ragged bits of text
sticking to the floor, like meager confetti,
the only complete words, a jumbled message
including away, literally, home, from,
temptation, and written.
One clue is an incomplete map,
also cut, torn, then folded with British Isles
in blue, green, pink, and a scale in Statute Miles.
On the other side of the fold, grey France, grey Norway,
and Switzerland so small and yellow,
below Germany, still divided into
East and West, in the only red words.