Child
You've boarded me over like a window or a well.
Mother
It was autumn
I couldn't hear the students
only the music coming in the window,
Se tu m’ ami
If you love me
I went for a week's journey in soft ermine.
Darling, the ovals of your hair...
autumn leaves,
your hair the hue of rain-drenched bark, your voice:
Don't ever leave me...
You who I don’ t know I don’ t know how to talk to you
— What is it like for you there?
Here... well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship —
The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear.
Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes.
But they will not be mine;
to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices —
What are you afraid of?
a labyrinth,
as if at its center,
god would be there —
but at the center, only rose,
where rose came from,
where rose grows —
& us, inside of the lips & lips:
the likenesses, the eyes, & the hair,
we are born of,
fed by, & marry with,
only flesh itself, only its passage
— out of where? to where?
Then god the mother said to Jim, in a dream,
Never mind you, Jim,
come rest again on the country porch of my knees.
Orange peels, burned letters, the car lights shining on the grass,
everything goes somewhereand everything we donothing
ever disappears. But changes. The roar of the sun in photographs.
Inching shorelines. Ice lines. The cells of our skin; our meetings,
our solitudes. Our eyes.
