1.
butterflies today

salt water,
fingernails

apples and learning to
kiss.
 

2.
summer days the baby splashes in language fingering its wet suffix on his skin says 'wet'
and 'water' as if the sounds connect his self to the memory and to my body wet with the 
touch of his which whispers 'yes, water' knowing as soon as the sound is made the water 
slips away
 

3.
My son is painting
his first pictures, I 
am tidying away. My 
question is this : when do we
stop making memories
and start making
detritus? 

worse still 
sentiment,
I hear them 
say.

4.
after the morning has finished talking
we take its photograph. The baby sits in the wet grass
thinking a lemon is a yellow ball. The door to the old shed
has let itself go, so you must break it open with your body. The wood
feeds itself to the spiders inside. I have become the kind of woman who does
the washing the night before and sometimes hangs it out in the darkness. It is still there 
this morning, wet, evidential.

5.
back lawn stretching its new word 'green' and lazy, your face a miracle of mischief 
bringing me sun screened fistfuls of thin stalks serious delicacies crush and thread and test 
the buttery mysteries of skin but cannot say daisy chains, say 'chasey days'
 

6.
today the poems cannot go outside
press their faces to the window like children
always watch you leave
 

7.
you are now learning the language of your body 
before your body has a language of its own

jump you scream when your feet are grounded
skip which the grammar of your legs can't prove
fast which is how you came to this place 
where your mind mouths images you cannot move
 

8.
washing the heart out with soap we know
there is trouble in every fairytale
how else do we recognize poison and glass?
 

9.
putting on clothes from the day before shaped with the memory smell of your body out 
with places where secrets have left their hands your heaviness a dream of others the 
language of marigold egg and lipstick thickness of fingers mirroring mouths all to be eaten 
with the resolve of a child's first kiss of seeing itself in the sleepless love of a mother face 
before you clean and divide it in a sign

10.
you are an angel of play and orange juice 
blocks and the musical pulp of fruit 
a whole day's sun waste on the floor
 

11.
mother's veins 
must surely be rivers
which change course
flood without speaking

dry
revising visions of their child
learning pain

words you pick up today : blood, stones
words I find today : monody, gravid
 

12.
here is the skin of nostalgia reading you books in a single bed your listening mouth wet 
head hot soft bowl and singing answers to how I wonder what you are an alphabet of 
bones an intertissuing your eye folding the slowness of holding sleep slip fingered a noon 
for storyless children are living syllables intrinsic his bread left love sucked on the 
nightstand palate roses nappies rolled into their warm blooms on the floor
 

13.
these are my days
and I am at home in them 
 

  © 2000