Seeming to love one, I loved many,
taking them in a place hidden and wide,
where You—like the vervain—became
multiples, bursts on a node.

Then I brang You missives
in the place where I was packed.
A thingplace where You lingered
and I took You by surprise.

What was colors hardened, and
the nofocused grew distinct.
I breathed the royal field vervain
through my heels and my hands,

tucked the strands in the brim
of a basket. I filled the basket
with fine, fat eggs and
dangled it from the hand.

It swung authentic time.
How the eggs knocked,
parting themselves
from silence.

No one will mistake me
for a young woman again.
I grow myself a rivering coat
for all who want to see.

At the inlet, sand relucts to less the tide.
Different, this water, civic and bright.
What chattering was in the shade
when You handed me.

A certain way I was is gone,
I admit, the ways that I was young.
Because I am not above the moon,
none of us is, I use it

to check myself.
Riotous in our orbits,
still confused by her ægis,
but not by her silver spleen.

Her movements mastered me
and I damped them in.
Wherefore I tend to follow river
with the sea,

sea who mutilates the lune
and cramps her shield
in its kaleidoscopic folds.
What’s in the riot’s domesticity.

I draw my riverjacket tight around
the bone. From the cupboard,
when I take the curtain to shake it clean,
what light falls out!

And a window appears behind it,
one that must never
have been somewhere,
except in a childish evening game.