What Is Freedom: Joan As Police Woman

I am the dance floor.
I am the mirrored face of the lake.
I am the ragged end of the abandoned water pipe
buried deep under the ocean where bacteria fuck and socialize.
Water under water over water inside water outside water —
aren’t we all right angles?

Rubik’s ice cubes —
that puzzle has 430 quadrillion combinations.
I am one more than that number by the way.
We are all one more than anything concrete I say.
Could it be that I could whet my own desire to be less?
Wouldn’t it be fun to be less? To have less — to be
just that one droplet mushrooming at the end
of an icicle, that one molecule of vapor
inside the lung of a vulture?

Let’s do it.
Let’s get smaller.
Let’s condense.
Let’s confuse.
Let’s spread out by contracting.
Let’s hide inside that waterlogged maple,
inside the jewelry box holding hair,
presumably from the head of a woman long-gone
to create a brooch with which to decorate your dress.
If you’ve seen them, you don’t forget.
I’m making one now out of hair collected
from the municipal pool on Manhattan Ave,
expertly named for a street in Brooklyn.

Once my father drove me deep into woods
in Maine to show me the beavers swimming
under the ice through a vast crush of canals,
created by obsessively sawing down trees
with their tools that also happen to be teeth.

I am underneath, too.
I am the underside of the sea
beholding all through the latticework of featherweed
and the diffuse blood of stampeding seahorses.

I am blurry to all who witness me from above.
I wave and they think I’m dancing,
which I am.