Dear wound-bearer, dear Grandmother:

          I am 10 years old and helping you into the bath,
perplexed by your limp, semi-frozen limbs, stroke still a word for cats.

          “I can’t,” you say, and I don’t roll my eyes
but place my hand under your right knee,

          as if to nudge a learning bird to fly,
but just to the lip of the tub, vintage robin egg blue.

          Because I am not yet afraid of falling,
the white bench calf deep in warm water seems close enough,

          too safe to be an island, a patch of ice or mixed-up alphabet.
Each room of me opens up into another, in a circle, so I am

          never trapped. “I’ll wait right outside,” I say, and step into
the cool bedroom with its leafy mural covered with horses in motion.

          Wintergreen steam follows me. Granny is like a big boat
that hasn’t seen the sea in a while, I think. Later, I comb out your long

          dark hair, fine, like mine, and fill it with pink and yellow barrettes.
We’ll listen to a record with songs for dancing, and head for the porch

          to watch maple shadows and meadow-spells,
where I spell words thick on the tongue: paralyzed, wagon train,

          whisky son, purple. The air around us perplexed and sweet
with the last of the lilies of the valley and first honeysuckle.

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