Inked In

Think of Seurat, insistent as a sewing machine,
      woodpeckering a canvas with his brush,
      needling blips of color into his penciled outline
      to saturate a landscape with confetti
      the way a telegraph operator hole-punches silence.
That’s how I imagine lines emerging
      from the illustrator’s pen,
      stitching walls to floorboards,
      threading bars on birdcages,
      crosshatching wire cubes over the heads of kittens,
      stacking towers into a corner as lightly as hatboxes.
      When the room is crowded as a closet
      the customer awakens from his reverie
      to find the shop has sprouted around him,
      fast as frost on a window.