Always anger, like a shovel, left in the yard overnight;
Always someone’s cat, dead under a heap;
Always a gnome crossing the castle lawn, counting his whiskers;
His money made from old shoes, stolen and gilded;
Always a rooster in the wagon, hiding, keen to capture;
Always a lady, wary of capture, pinned to the grass;
The sea full of rings, the sea full of itself and other people’s hair,
And the worms in the earth watching us, the sound turned off;
The sea trapped in its own body, randy, despised in a new wig;
Hallelujah, say the children, who have grown and are waking,
Their toes and skin in place, and nothing missing;
Something sloshing through them, briny, not of themselves;
The sea carrying diseases, mangy as a dog, rising, never crashing;
The children under one fur, black and lustrous as lawn,
The gnome petting;
If the sea can’t stop
Looking in the children’s mirror, riding their ponies,
Slapping their limits, washing their caves, making marrow
Of their femurs, handprints where their hands should be,
Filling their towers;
Then always the sea, and the panther’s fur;
Always the myth, placenta in the panther’s mouth;
Buried, tamped down in the yard;
The children go still as a party, and back to sleep;
The painting goes on, shifting her roots, her branches.