Good beginnings

Good beginnings

I am clean, my hair is dandelion, I am wearing dungarees,
my mother’s wrist crops the shot,
holding me para-glider above the basket.
I am eager, leaning to meet you with my full weight,
marble focussed on your concentric sleeping,
this is your teammate, your opposite, your silent collaborative.

My grandmother, her long hair in loaves, is outside
watering old succulents and stones from foreign landscapes.
She can hear the introduction, her yeasty daughter
administering equal affection for her children.
There is something she does not want to leak, her lips set, brusquely
her spine feeling for these beginning people.

She re-enters the humming kitchen,
carrying trays of germinating seedlings.
She collects the little babushka from the bedroom,
she has a smaller daughter,
she knows about concentrics,
knows the linearity of new relationships.

In the kitchen, she leans one handed into the bread mix,
stretching wrist to index, leaving planetary ring prints.
She takes a long look at the window,
the home an Ibsen stage set,
the paper chains of pigeons.
the woman holding a mirror image.

Outside it’s raining, she knows songs, does calligraphy,
makes clay into mountains,
she knows how to make good beginnings
and she dances with me, the rain background of heartbeats.