The Child is Still Kin

Child's pose

Both hands spread to feel the floor,
the child I am is still kin to carpet,
tile, dust-drift beneath cupboards.

The child I am spreads forearms
along this coolness, taking in
how much the floor gives and resists.

She curls into her kneecaps, warm
familiars, pressing into the small
dark made by her greying head.

The tops of her feet flat against
the ground, the child I remain
makes herself hummock, hill, barrow

full of the self's jewels, small spine
a path from darkness to darkness,
arms twin tree roots cradled in earth.

If I can be brave

I love to lie on the rust-orange carpet by
the shiny floor that stops at the heat vents,
black slats like little venetian blinds.
I peer between them. Can I see the basement?
Can I hear Grandma and Grandpa talking?

I slide along the varnished floor in sock feet,
turn and creep down the basement stairs.
If I face it, the darkness, if I can be brave,
Grandma will give me a glass of 7UP
and scratch my back on the green and white
brocade couch and let me watch every last
minute of The Lawrence Welk Show.

Let me make it through the black basement
kitchen, then run into the living room. Lamps
will be on. Grandpa will smoke a pipe in his
brown leather chair. Grandma's hair will shine
in its perfect silver waves. Everything will
be safe, blanket-cozy, almost-bedtime good.

Un-sister

The un-sister who barely came to be
in this world stayed in God's mind
with the un-roses: red almond-shape shadows.

I dream her idling about the un-garden
with all the un-born, bodiless smiles
painted on the airless atmosphere

of the vast un-place of the un-made,
faux perfection of the un-tried and un-spoken.
I hold up my hand of flesh, bathed

in particle waves of material light.
It cannot close around nothing.
We're always bearing handfuls of atoms.

Even when very still and thinking
of my un-living sister among the haze
of un-created flowers, matter sparks.

Light dances across synapses in the mind's
dark, where everything imagined
has its name, its own small electric body.

The horse is a cathedral

When I was tiny and afraid of everything,
I still wanted horses. The merry-go-round
was an embodied swirl of everything
inside me: roundness, heaviness, smooth
hooves, necks arched and settled into
elegant skulls with coal-of-fire eyes.

Even horses' nostrils opened and shut
with strength, with rushing intent. Across
their broad backs and taut haunches spread
the finery: false gold and silver, painted
brocade, lacquer-leather, riot of faux luxury.

A horse is a cathedral of a beast, its
central nave and side chapels buttressed
in holy proportions, its bell tower set
with eyes, its mane pennons streaming.
An assemblage of disks and spheres,
planes and pulleys, vivified into anti-

gravity glory: the pressure, the pound
of galloping, pulling away and away from
earth like pushed blood, heart's hoofbeats.
The first photographers captured the horse,
harnessed the heft, the muscular curl

of it in midair, four hooves hovering
in a knot above the ground: emblems,
heraldic angels, seraphim packed tight
into their bodies and sent down to run,
to make the dusty earth a pulsing drum.