Susurrant Childhood

Eventually, your mother will let winter be stacked

upon her lap of whispers.  When she walks,

a long winged golden creature walks with her; onward,

over an array of silence, she hears a fixed cry,

a little bird skeleton, mudlarks, white floating

voices sprung of water.  At that moment

your sleeve sharply lowers into a green physics,

your future, always at arms length, dies.  The forest

lies behind the bird, the thaw of the ocean

lies behind the forest. Eventually, there is a frieze

of violets burning; you will remember the house

you loved, the expense of weeding, the skin

of that other skin. You have swept

the lamp and are belied and sent back

and now rest swollen with grief.   Stung swift stoked.  You are

in the proximity in which you have become immediate

**

Maureen Alsop’s most recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Action Yes, PANK, Switchback, Inertia, Whiskey Island, Drunken Boat, and Born Magazine. She is the author of Apparition Wren.

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