Kathryn Simmonds

The baby sleeps. Sunlight plays upon my lap, through doily leaves a black lab comes, a scotty goes, the day wears on, the baby wakes. The good birds sing, invisible or seldom seen, in hidden kingdoms, grateful for the in- between. The baby sleeps. Elsewhere the Queen rolls by on gusts of cheer — ladies wave and bless her reign. The baby frets. The baby feeds. The end of lunch, a daytime moon. The leaves are lightly tinkered with. It’s spring? No, autumn? Afternoon? We’ve sat so long, we’ve walked so far. The woods in shade, the woods in sun, the singing birds, the noble trees. The child is grown. The child is gone. The black lab comes, his circuit done. His mistress coils his scarlet lead.

We wash up side by side to find each other in the speakable world, and, lulled into sense, inhabit our landscape; the curve of that chair draped with your shirt; my glass of  water seeded overnight with air. After this bed there’ll be another, so we’ll roll and keep rolling until one of  us will roll alone and try to roll the other back — a trick no one’s yet pulled off — and it’ll be as if   I dreamed you, dear, as if   I dreamed this bed, our touching limbs, this room, the tree outside alive with new wet light. Not now. Not yet.