She’s up against her mother’s legs sucking milk. She’s walking the pasture just barely steady in deep grass. Look at her black reflective eyes— you can see the fence wires there, a line stretched across her sight. There’s her mother back the other way, swaying to the sounds that cows move to. She hears it …
In finger reach I kept you— as a small thing beginning, your hair weaving my hands to you, your hands knitting my arms— you were the beginning of growing, laced into the gaps I had, and then you were the how of growing: out of my arms but still no further from me than a …
Hyacinth grows up with its heavy head, so solid even with its dome of star-like flowers and fragrance lighter than breath. The wet ground is not far enough below it; it becomes part of the hyacinth’s appearance and breathes its own heavy odor. When the wind blows, it shakes from base to top and cannot …
Where I was born, out of the opening wings of my mother’s legs and into the hands of someone I would never see again, was a place I would not go back to, and later, a hundred times, a thousand, I was in my mother’s arms, like wings that folded over me, but mammal-warm. Because …
The way the bees in the lavender are so intent on nectar that they don’t notice me: I am not one of them, I am not the wind that knocks them off their flower, slows them down, and I am not the sun speeding the flowers past this bloom. I am a shadow, a footstep …
Because she was the first I did not know it as familiar, how quickly the body takes in a different kind of breath that is the beginning of a different kind of breathing that will not change back again. Pulse changes, shifts, blossoms in that surge of rose- red blood, and the skin I wore …
I watch you down the row, picking, chest close to leaves, legs close to straw, fingers red and busy, and I am glad for that hot sun distracting me from all the thoughts that have made me angry hours ago and makes you beautiful, a figure of desire, steaming with sweat, smiling up to me …
I like the look of sadness on a face because I know it, can welcome its shape against my hand and feel its smoothness. I like the way my fingers can knead its doughy cheeks and softened jaw, the way my own breathing changes to its slowed- down breath. I like that I can kneel …