We live in a house of water

descent nor sky nor sea

the detritus settles into the silver in the mirror

          in the coral museum, minuscule Barbie bike given up on flying

succumbs to gravity, dead to the sun’s call

once memory in a pearl turns to a shell in the tide

both in and out the water lives

the tsunami flows in to the tales askew

Middlemarch 20 years past

An infinity of “Who was?”

back when we marched and asked

the moon why it never spoke

scoured maps for glittering Paris lights, helical flights

back when a dream was enough for a turn of the sun

I am too soon for the break of dawn

    too late for the dusk

              no longer the girl that imagines the stars in epic tales

  draws ill-fitting dresses to spin my own joy

  dances against the rhythm

    I live in a house made of water

the foundations carried away in the flood

the words I carve only into blueprints

running headlong from the brick

when the riptide comes, I dive back into the dollhouses

of climax and resolution

                          easier blinded to the solstice than to see the flames

these days, I set the redwoods ablaze

in search of a cobbled epiphany

                          these days, the sea forces me into thrall

                                            hold my breath to spare agony

  of confronting a symmetric poem of scars

yet these days, stone calls to my weeping blisters

and yet, I run toward the sun in verse

no longer willing words to step out of time

outside of this sea of yearning

      in this depot between heaven and hell

           in this house made of water,

                          I carve my heart of bedrock

                                     just in time for memory to settle into the abyss

                                     just in time to reclaim the fire

                                   ready to craft a jungle from the silence