When I was a child, my eye was older than an oak.From the highest chair, I saw string beans move from mybrother’s plate into my mother’s mouth when my father lookedaway. I watched my sister spit her peas behind the sink. A dogmoved from the woods toward the kitchen door. The houseunfolding like a book.I read my father’s secret history of anger, my mother’s dissertationon subterfuge, their parlor of doubt, the kitchen of theirdiscontent.This was my host country and I its virus.I witnessed a world that couldn’t be explained. Rhymed andunrhymed, its alien talk floated above a blanket of verse.In time, I would adopt its pattern language. I would deliver itsmessages like a page. I would spy with my little eye. I would openand close like a camera.In the stories of that planet, I would find no character resemblingmyself, so I would place myself outside them, in a poem.When I was a child, I hated lace; I buried all the dolls.I hid in the snow and thought about what it would mean: todisappear. A little ghost whispering help!, testing its alarms.But when I was grown, I opened the box of broken dolls, andwhen it was dark, I held the tree by its branches and all thechildish words rustled back into the woods, into the purple snow.I knew there was a story larger than anything.At the back of the lens, the end was already on fire.