Cider light of spring
perforates the maples—
they bloom in tight vermilion packets
that the squirrels chew, discard.
Fabric of small aggregates of families,
pushbikes, buckets, stuffies.
Single thunder of the metal slide undenting.
The mothers clutch coffees, they wave and relate.
I’m not quite right.
One hand pushes the swing, the other holds an open book,
paper valley of an elsewhere.
And an axe, Kafka said—
love, I recalibrated all catastrophes
when you were born,
and they were worse—
the sloping lines I read
in gulps while automatically repeating
wheeeeeee
as you fly elliptically out
of my attention, which should be undivided, but is
skulking for the possibility
that words
could suddenly align the elements—
then every gesture
has a choreography: rope climber in its tilted
orbit, woman emptying
a shoe of sand, fledgling
robin’s skimming flight—and I’m
forgiven, bookish, motherly, because the weave,
made visible, leaves nothing out,
not even you, not even me.
