The Hen Upstairs

At night she dreams that with a bunch of women (together there were five) she births the world They focus on the work, they form a circle of their naked arms. They sway, and sing, and push. (She's got a ball of yellow light inside that wants to grow and to go out, or burst.) She feels she's ready now the way she hadn't been for thousands times She has two daughters, one by one. They come full-shaped,  well-formed, grown-up. One is the darkness of the world, the other's blonde and fine - a dragonfly spine-like, the bee-like soft She loves the first one - the one who has black hair, who wears green-framed glasses to see into the mother pearl of things Meanwhile, the forest grows around the scar. The light-haired one finds her home there. She takes her husband with her, a bed, a stove,  and two  small bikes. In due time, she gives birth  twice. The boys grow up and save the world from lack of love The women smile and close their eyes. The world goes on.

The way she smokes the body of the cigarette gives in to the breath of flame She inhales the fogs from above  the lakes, burning her fingers on the fish's scales she drowns her dreams she breaks the rules beforehand following the track that isn't hers she grows apart from moss  and ferns One day she finds a baby dragon in her purse on the recess She takes it home and nurses it, and brings it up until it grows and leaves the nest she wove for him Then she exhales

Where they grow there is a certain kind of love something invisible, unvisioned, from long ago a silenced tongue that can't keep quiet anymore

the mud, the cast, the cake  made out of love the longing of the stars, the broom, the stake, the burning eyes

Each time I start planning on leaving you like one leaves their parents' hut or the fortress of one's regal obligations to the world (or so it feels like) or one's single cell your love breaks my heart the way the knife cuts into the flesh of the bread baked just last night And I stay

The dog outside barks the barking's automobile-like the noise comes from the times when cars were newborns of the globe Under the stars everything new carries inside echoes and shapes of last-night's ancient yesterdays and something else that wasn't there before it came Look at the breath: each one is old like the world itself but is never the same as well the same is true about the waves, the crocodiles, the eye- lashes, the Nile banks, the well, the cave, the seek-and-hide, the dogs barking outside

to hunt for dew to pierce each droplet through the very matter of the heart  to taste the other side of its being without (the) breaking of the wholeness of its shape to drink it like the sacrament of blood to breathe, to die, to rest the air that holds us in its arms - it is so vast

An apple in an apple pie entering the mind through the burstline of an open mouth A myriad drop- lets in a water- fall  An open- ness of a para- sol when it rains-not The mess of a loch, your hair in a lock The locker in the field of green where things go another way round The messiness of a kiss The storm, the cin- namon of petals of an anemone I once got from you before I forgot your name, the waste of time on my part  of I don't-know-what the broth of solitude, the breath of God, ah!

I'm hungry for the cows, the way  they chew upon everything that enters them  through their mouths three times Three times is what breaks the spell and makes new order even if the making's  from the old, from what was there, from what it's been like  for so long I'm hungry for poems and for fairytales. I'm hungry for  the pearls my grandma wore