Papergown

White sleeps by the bucketful.
White lies down in pieces.
White snaps like the pearl bones of birds.

White staggers in its enormity, its pachydermal sadness.
It shores up the dyke denying night.

White burns its blank onto my retina,
slips a cake of soap into my robe.
It claims me as erasure.

From time to time white reminds me
of all the water shapes that quake, beads
tugged by suction through a tube.

By the tic of my eyelid, I am moving
towards white with all alacrity,
with all my parts,
which are sore and terrible.

**************

My starting word was "papergown," which I read somewhere I don't remember, and which triggered "pachydermal," because of the P and also because a papergown is like skin to the pachy's dermal. I also collected "enormous," one of my favorite words, though it morphed here to "enormity." The other words just came.