nascence

i.

I'm sitting in a green room,

the carpet like that fake tacky grass on indoor golf courses,

except darker,

softer. There's stuff spread out around me on that floor-

toys, or pieces of a game-

and I can hear someone's voice murmuring softly

from the couch beside me. Breeze pulls in

.

from beyond a screen and bathes my face,

a cold shower on waking.

.

ii.

I'm staring up at the ripples

dividing the surface of a chlorinated pool from the sky above. I'm

thrashing

useless arms at my sides and the sun

glinting in the ripples appears to be dimming, but it’s really the light

in my eyes that is slowly taking its leave, going, going,

.

until my father's strong hands come down and pull

me up, wrap me in a big brown towel and the warmth folds over my skin

like being reborn.

.

iii.

I'm seated in the back of a long, darkened closet,

clothes hanging like discarded skins around me,

brushing my shoulders and hair.

I can hear muffled noise from elsewhere in the house,

but they're so faint it's easy to pretend they're coming from another world.

No one knows I'm here: strange, the things that excite a child.

The air smells like mothballs and sun-ripened raspberry,

the smells of my grandmother, and I lean

back against the wall, half of me expecting to continue tumbling

.

beyond its sheetrock perimeter, a trust fall to Narnia.

A skirt falls over my eyes like a veil, and I disappear

even unto myself.

.

iv.

I sit up in bed,

hearing my mother's voice beyond the window.

I kneel in the sheets and peer down at a garden below,

her standing in the middle of it smiling up at me.

Come down, she says. Don't waste the day.

I don't know if I do-

.

for all I know I have an entire lifetime left with her.

I'm young, and stupid, and it is bliss.

.

v.

in the last one,

I'm waking in my Nana’s attic, my brother stretched

out on the floor beside me, still sleeping.

There's a noise coming from beneath the narrowest place

where the eaves slant, and I see a board game -or a book- stir,

falling from the top of its pile with no hand to push it.

The item is light, insubstantial, the culprit a mouse or nothing at all,

and yet some dark, exultant thing in my chest says,

.

no, this is it: the force that moves the universe, watching

from where it thinks it cannot be seen.

What reward, or what punishment, will come of your witness?