Seeded crackers on a plate. Feet weaving past one another

up the stairs. Gentle knock to a door. I could take

my daughter here, if ever...

When a man builds a house on the water,

his woman rises up three children there.

Then this happens again and again in that same house,

and they say “He built this for us on the water.”

On Elbow Lake a storm promises

to stampede the sky with its chorus of hooves.

Grandmother sends us out for flowers.

I’m alive in her. Mornings she sets down

her ladder, lacerating water. She meets the Elodea

and the bowed bank just to turn home again.

Through the deadend forest, clutching

any dogwood the millipedes passed over,

I find an infant’s forgotten bootie.

You say “let’s have one,” what we say to each other

when we visit my cousin, her little Lucy Pearl.

Then “well, how would you want to?”

Neither of us are rich,

and both of us hate needles.

Stitched into the hanging V of paper crows

over the bed: I’ll never be a mother.

When I think of us in bed, a quiet house,

morning slants in with the world behind it.

When I think of my child,

she’s a little world against my chest.

In the silences

I hope for an accident,

as if something could decide for us.