It was like falling through a mirror
into someone else’s story,
the years when the children were small.
Your mother’s story perhaps
of falling into a lake
at the edge of summer
when you were still in the stars,
waiting to be borne across the water,
her body, leaf-light,
skimming across the tar-green water,
thick as the well water
where the blind trout lived.
As children you knew he lived there,
swallowed into the sunless shaft,
his tail a blunt and soft propeller
stirring the velvet water.
Sleep wrapped in water
and moss-green fur,
summer nights you climbed the hill
to peer into the dark,
listening for your name
as it fell like a coin into the well.
Somewhere between desire and acceptance-
blossoms of water
opening at the sound of you-
your eyes grew accustomed to the dark.
When you were still in the stars,
she’d say of a time before you were born,
as if the world, the animals and the trees
and the light within it were dark and prehistoric.
You wanted to believe there existed
in time two points,
the sleeve of a constellation
you could trace like a primitive map,
a woman stepping out of the trees
to look at the night.
Through the underwater light
of a household sunk in sleep
you would swim toward your own children
and they toward you,
the dim current of night lights
and sullen rocking setting the house adrift,
unmoored into the street,
lopsided and lit like a jack-o’-lantern.
The rest is forgotten history,
the clock stopping one afternoon
like a car skidding into a snowbank
where it would be wedged all winter
in front of your house.
And waking as if years later
in another country,
wearing the clothes of a foreign climate,
you, the oddly dressed person
who steps out onto the porch,
searching for a point of reference-
difficult when the sky and the trees are falling.
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