Tissue

• Paper that lets the light shine through,
• this

  is what could alter things.
• Paper thinned by age or touching,
• the kind you find in well-used books, the back of the Koran,
•  where a hand has written in the names and histories, who was born to whom,
• the height and weight, who

  died where and how,
•  on which sepia date, pages smoothed and stroked and turned transparent with attention.
• If buildings were paper, I might feel their drift,
•  see how easily they fall away on a sigh, a shift in the direction of the wind.
• Maps too. The sun shines through their borderlines, the marks that rivers make, roads,

  railtracks, mountainfolds,
• Fine slips from grocery shops that say how much was sold
•  and what was paid by credit card might fly our lives like paper kites.
• An architect could use all this, place layer over layer,
• luminous script over numbers over line,

  and never wish to build again with brick
• or block, but let the daylight break through capitals and monoliths,
• through the shapes that pride can make, find a way to trace a grand design
• with living tissue, raise a structure never meant to last,
• of paper smoothed and stroked and thinned to be transparent,
• turned into your skin.