On my heart, a little lion’s head grows.
It is a place of several evenings.
When I am asked
to paint my home, I paint
a dark red circle.
One way to see
my baby crawling
through the yard is as a mass of matter:
thistle, bluegrass, thorns. The baby looks
back at her coordinates in me.
Sometimes
these coordinates that I carry
are terrifying. A distant hillside calls through
the painting—
little bursts of magnesium & calcium.
One bicycle, up the hill,
drawing octagons through air.
I write ebb on the window-pane, feeling
a little scared. I think steady now,
you numskull.
Steady.
