Her first puzzle had three pieces,
she’d take the last piece, and turn it,
and lower it in, like a sewer-lid,
flush with the street. The bases of the frames were like
wooden fur, guard-hairs sticking out
of the pelt. I’d set one on the floor and spread
the pieces out around it. It makes me
groan to think of Red Riding Hood’s hood,
a single, scarlet, pointed piece, how
long since I have seen her. Later, panthers,
500 pieces, and an Annunciation,
1,000 pieces, we would gaze, on our elbows,
into its gaps. Now she tells me
that if I were sitting in a twenty-foot barn,
with the doors open at either end,
and a fifty-foot ladder hurtled through the barn
at the speed of light, there would be a moment
– after the last rung was inside the barn
and before the first rung came out the other end –
when the whole fifty-foot ladder would be
inside the twenty-foot barn, and I believe her,
I have thought her life was inside my life
like that. When she reads the college catalogues, I
look away and hum. I have not grown
up yet, I’ve lived as my daughter’s mother
the way I had lived as my mother’s daughter,
inside her life. I have not been born yet.