Katie Wolff, red, 2021 (Artist Website, Instagram)
Watercolor, 5 x 7”
Night hovers in the lilacs outside the window.
Inside, where I am falling through sleep’s winding stems and axils,
a different darkness pulls me down into the deep.
Cate is teaching me the lessons of nothingness.
(The closest I can get to her is to dream slowly slowly.)
Lucy’s six-year-old voice reaches me like a drowning-rope with a hook.
She wants to ask the question long working up
inside her, just to hear her mother’s voice
in the silence, opening and closing like a door.
She draws me up, against the heft,
fatigue and deadweight, hand-over-hand.
The room is warm with childhood
when she asks, how does a little girl become a woman?
I shoulder out of the linen awake enough to see
she does not want to know about the womb’s sac of water
we carry, or the blood that pours out of us.
Poised in the interval, the space between asleep and awake, in the emptiness
—this is where my heart goes to meet her.
The answer comes in the ether softly widening
around us. Coiled so quiet. Opaque and see-through.
Around us coiled so quiet, opaque and see-through,
the answer comes in the ether softly widening.
This is where my heart goes to meet her—
poised in the interval, the space between asleep and awake, in the emptiness
we carry, or the blood that pours out of us.
(She does not want to know about the womb’s sac of water.)
I shoulder out of the linen awake enough to see.
When she asks, how does a little girl become a woman?
the room is warm with childhood,
fatigue and dead weight. Hand-over-hand,
she draws me up against the heft
in the silence opening and closing like a door
inside her. Just to hear her mother’s voice,
she wants to ask the question long working up.
Lucy’s six-year-old voice reaches me like a drowning rope with a hook.
(The closest I can get to Cate is to dream.) Slowly, slowly,
Cate is teaching me the lessons of nothingness.
A different darkness pulls me down into the deep
inside. Where I am falling through sleep’s winding stems and axils,
night hovers in the lilacs outside the window.