Missing Person

history in a state of busy construction / you can see
the signs in pieces scattered with various tools / extended
throughout the town / as by the river where a fish
was caught last summer / or at the arena spinning
slowly the way sand might at the narrowest point in
an hourglass / then words pinched off / no longer a story
but rather a book hastily closed because the doorbell
rang / the pot boiled over / the dog ate the newspaper / and
all words of her history went on strike / and everyone
guessed at outcomes / and everyone had their opinion of
the final unrealized creation so rudely abandoned
and stripped of the linear order of a historical work