Circles - Venetian Dreams

I am washed inside and made of models –
bones from our toy medical kit when we were three and
life was so much simpler (caught backwards, like fairy footsteps).

I only smile a fragment,
because the world is very, very old (and has seen everything).
We do not escape
definition; we avoid it, sliding past
two-dimensional friends
that never made it into our history.

I do not swallow lies stale – they go down me, wet and silent
at first, and harden in my belly. Then my eyes are Venetian:
swollen glass          caught at the wrong size –
dropping     ^eye-glitter
careful china faces. And like the turn of the waterways –
I wonder if wishing is a displacement; we fall out of alignment with the straightened world to make circles –
geometrically, they are less constant. A square steadies, rules; they shatter
into orbit.

But they are also wheels, to soften the grate of time
as it slurs ashes – dead things
like grey rats, dun and comfortable with their world. I prefer
the toes of dreams;
(treading on my dress folds from the sixteenth century
that do not belong in reality)
but should I?