121. A Few Hours at Home Between Sleeping

In being at a location, in starting
To move in a direction, in staying
In place and watching what moves before you,
In these ways you are part of the world,
You are integrated into reality.

Every leaf of your hand folding
Into every leaf of your other hand,
Folding like a drumming of sound
Into the sound of the leaves folding
Like a book into stillness and silence.

Build, like a daughter, a holding against
Your body, like a hug, a way to make her
Yours and to make you her mother
At a time in the morning before waking
And maybe you even slept through it.

The taste of cooking before you cook it
Upon the skillet against your tongue,
The feel of warmth and flavor and the time
It takes to cook it so that it has changed
In taste to what you want your tongue to taste.

Not cleaning, but being clean, a process
Resulting in clean, to remove an article of
Clothing, to wipe something, to wipe
Something again, to keep something from
Falling, to keep everything from falling.

A string as a structure of direction, as a
Means of securing something in place, as
The concatenating instances of existence,
Each little piece, each tiny action, moving
In place to show you the whole you’d not imagined.

Without intention to define a way to or even
A means of, without intention but with a
Persistence to determine one, in this manner
They can live a life (determined and undirected),
Waiting for the next click of the next clock.

Little girl in a dress and a smile whom you call
Your daughter and another little girl in the same
Whom you call the same, and Sunday morning
Is filled, like a glass with water, with sunlight,
And you could drink the whole day down.

At the edge of decision, there is the fear of falling,
But a child doesn’t have it, because it is not decision
That makes a child fall but the process of reaction
Against a friendly or dangerous environment, so that
A child finds herself often falling when meaning to run.

A fence for a dog but a yard for a child, the space
You give her, and everything in that space, and
A road beside the space, a direction outward,
Because everything you create and everything you
Love is something you eventually give away.

Taken as a pair, two daughters seem entirely different,
Without the similarities, even, of two volumes of a book,
But they are always the same somewhere, they will
Always laugh somehow to tell you that, they will remember
The way your eyes looked at them, they will remember.

We dream as if a child is made of nothing but heart and
That she loves us with that heart that is her entirely, but
She is more than heart, and so she is less than it, because
She is nothing more than a human person living a human life
Out in a way that is flawed and failed and ultimately beautiful.

She is not the child you had imagined she would
Be so she is exactly the child you wanted and
She is exactly the child she is, and if you give
Her space she will be the child you had imagined
She would be or she will be something more.

It is the sound of sunlight that awakens you
Every morning, it is the sound of sunlight that
Awakens you, and you’ve no idea why it is so loud,
Why the sun is so loud in the morning, why
The sun is as loud as your thoughts must be.