Maureen

Looking through the window
                                                                   of the false cupboard. She pointed you
into the mouth's downy nests. Birth tiny birth. Weak
                      streams of breath gather across the field. Outside, under diminutive cedars,
a valley of asters, an early snow.

The watched birch are seen wakened, and at the fire pit
                                                                                your dead parents. Sawdust filmed
the darkening valley. You were three years old when you first heard sunlight
               rip through trees, narrow shoots branched upward
to the sound of its diminish. Around you now this October farmhouse yellows.
                      Sapling words influence the barriers of a middle distance. Bees
thrum the troughs surface as the edges of your mother's spirit give way. She is relegated

again into the physical. She wraps three amber plums in sackcloth.