He finds her one
piece at a time
along railroad tracks, in riverbeds, beneath
piers, over gutters. It takes

months to find her mouth,
but the hands appear
without effort. His search begins

when he’s walking
along the shoulder
of a dusty road
outside a town he has considered home. Not
so much anymore. A patch
of sapphire light

in the distance drags him
into the brush—a freight
line that time forgot. Wild flowers
he knows someone would call weeds,

except for that color. It draws him in. There, surrounded
by ties and a broken empty Wild
Turkey bottle caught in the dirt, two imperfectly round
stones the color of an angry ocean
before the eye
of a storm. They become
the start, his decision

to invent a woman
from what he can’t know.
In the gathering,  

he is not literal—no black
tupelo twigs for limbs, no
algae strands for hair. No,
he collects what he collects
because she is guiding him
to make her whole, complex
enough to hold his attention

for longer than the discovery
of each piece. There is only one
rule he follows:
he must be walking.