My daughter says,
“Mom, me never live
in clouds before.”
She is two.
“Do you want to?”
I ask her.
“Mm hmm,” she says.
And I, too, want
to inhabit a world
I have never lived in before—
want to live in the inner sky,
in each note of the song
as it unwinds
from the breath,
in the silence after,
in the world
that can never be spoken.
I want to root out
everything I know
and live in that empty garden
where the only thing
that blooms is what is.
My daughter
moves on to chatter
about how girls
swallow rocks.
“Makes me cough,”
she says. And I wonder
how many rocks
even now
are rattling
in my throat.