The drive that powers Ellie’s imagination beyond the great expanse
is that of a victim who can neither rid herself of a memory
nor learn to sidle up next to it and hold its hand.

Sometimes six-packs channel this energy into song,
into a dance so wild she spills from her banks
like a river filled, simultaneously, with rain and snow melt.

Usually silence sends the energy to the canvas,
to sombre pigments that fill the shadows with a threat
or place some figure in the deeper part of an ocean.

Sometimes the walls of her house conduct the colors
of her anger, though her television provides an amnesia
to the larger futility of self-directed rage.

Ellie gathers opposites hoping they’ll cancel each other out,
but they don’t. No big bang starts things all over again—
only the little lights moving farther away in the expanding universe.