Seeded crackers on a plate. Feet weaving past one
another up the stairs. Gentle knock to a door. I
could take my daughter here, if ever… 

When a man builds a house on the water, 
his woman rises up three children there. 

Then this happens again and again in that same
house, and they say “He built this for us on the
water.” 

On Elbow Lake a storm promises 
to stampede the sky with its chorus of hooves. 

Grandmother sends us out for flowers. 
I’m alive in her. Mornings she sets down 
her ladder, lacerating water. She meets the
Elodea and the bowed bank just to turn
home again. 

Through the deadend forest, clutching 
any dogwood the millipedes passed over, 
I find an infant’s forgotten bootie. 

You say “let’s have one,” what we say to each
other when we visit my cousin, her little Lucy
Pearl. Then “well, how would you want to?” 

Neither of us are rich, 
and both of us hate needles. 

Stitched into the hanging V of paper
crows over the bed: I’ll never be a
mother. 

When I think of us in bed, a quiet house, 
morning slants in with the world behind it. 

When I think of my child, 
she’s a little world against my chest. 

In the silences 
I hope for an accident, 
as if something could decide for us.