You stand in your own body and watch your fingers bend. Your ten small bones
crooked and broken. In shadows, they look like the birds that can't be caught. In shadows,
your fingers

play in the mud without you and come back home into your bedspreads
without waking you. (Half-closed windows, wrens,

skin flecked with day: you don't remember.)

There is a singing
in your head, a nursery rhyme. It is sung here and sung again
in the morrow. The laughter. The child. You know the hills,

the top-knot that was blown by the wind, and you want to feel
very deeply, very intimately, very closely

but every time you do
something in you

falls.

(A vase, a plate, a sixpence.)

It is how you live, how you shelter one limb and forget the other,

or being woken by the sound of something dropping
and walking all the way to the living room

to find that nothing

has been dropped, nothing
has been ruined

at all.

You don't
open your eyes. Your body knows. It has lived in you
for sixteen years. You have ignored it for sixteen years. Sixteen years say: (This is an ache

outside a body. The water leaks from the broken roof
onto the tiles, and in-between,

your eyelids flutter.

In-between, you are searching.)