Julie Parson-Nesbitt

Poetry is not my ambition, it’s my way of being alone.
Fernando Pessoa

My friend diapers her newborn,
folding down the cotton edges with
a hiss of Velcro, she finishes
with a quick kiss.

I ride words through a tunnel of sleepless nights.
I dream of the child who swam off like a silvery fish
trailing her smile like slow bubbles on calm water.
Her name, still rich and sharp on our tongues,
is all we have left to follow and we repeat it
over and over the way parents pretend
to gobble up the tender skin of the child with kisses.

Give us this day, o god, our grief
or our mouths will be empty.

Some dreams are like chores you never finish.
Night after night I spiral down a long iron staircase.
A man is running behind me. No matter
how many times we fly down the stairs
swinging out around dangerous edges
he will never catch me
and I will never escape him.

Some women imagine motherhood
the way I imagine stillness.
But that can’t be right. My friend says
being a mother is the opposite of solitude.
Fearing one, women long for the other.
Or maybe it’s just me, slowly
learning to breathe silence
when I should have been dreaming children.

How to explain to the noisy, laughing, fiery
world that my ambition is only quiet.
I walk down a street of chattering traffic and
disappear into black alleys, I tip over the sly
hinge of sleep into a private darkness.

In a dream someone calls out
Ollie ollie in come free! but no child returns.

I fold words to hold the world together.
Elegant as a mandala, or
old-fashioned as diaper pins, sometimes
it’s all we have left to count on.

The spiral staircase circles down and down.
At the bottom is the mirror of my true face
or a snowfall of words, or a child’s name.

In that complete stillness
I once watched a red tulip
open its petals.