Colored dots create images in a style called pointillism.
In newsprint, stories told use black dots.
In the language of the blind, words in braille employ tactile dots.
Tattoos are created by engraving skin with ink dots.
Morse code speaks in the language of the dots.

The ellipsis is three dots meaning an omission
or a trailing off…
The period is the dot of stop.
Sister comma has a dot with a small tail
and manages only the pause.
She is either used too often or not enough
and it is the rare person who has mastered her properly.
To add to her mystique, if one raises her up
to make a contraction or to show possession
she changes her identity and becomes an apostrophe.
In duplicity she becomes quotation.
The colon twins offer things to come
and the semi-colon has come to be a substitute
for the comma with its own mysterious flair.

Then there are polka dots as in teeny weeny yellow
polka dot bikini whose purpose remains inscrutable
but somehow suggests deficiency.
When the dot-com bubble burst many folks lost their shirts.
Commands such as “be there at 6 on the dot” and
“sign on the dotted line” reveals its authoritarianism.
Great discoveries in human history have often been
described as the act of connecting the dots.
In ancient San script, the dot, nothing more than a dark spot
symbolized that profound mathematical concept, zero
allowing for the origin of calculus and all that followed.

Even the government makes use of the dot
as in the anacronym, Department of Transportation.
So many things use the multifaceted dot.

I once had a friend named Dot who had a way of making
a point that stuck with you forever and a more loyal friend
you could not have. She died of cancer that appeared
as black dots on an imaging film.

Here in this painting, a forest of dots along a shoreline
of dots, four dotted characters are loading goods
and supplies onto a dotted boat.
It seems innocent enough but an element of loss is felt
as if something was not complete or as if the ship
was taking away some of the forest.

“So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost”
sometimes even the ubiquitous dot
as if something is there and then it’s not.