The Space You Occupy Poem by Maria Barnas

The rocks will have to turn carefully into deer
on the ridge of the hill. Ragged and blacker every night.

The sheep run as a white stain a hand wipes a piece of peel
from the table no from the grey

meadow. Must have been startled by the huge irresolute
creatures. How the hill in the water -

My mother moves as a memory
moves as my mother in the uncertain garden.

Not true: she rinses out a room of glass.
I have her questions:

are you ever woken up with a start without any age
by memories that drip on your forehead
till they become facts. They fit

your name incontrovertibly a street a number and a country
to write on the back of an envelope.

That you are a woman and what that means no you
as you blow-dry the morning and puff a lock

of the past from our forehead with a sigh. You comb knots
from my hair. Don't move. We are so like each other.

Where were we? There
they are on the right. No those are stones.

Translation: 2008, Donald Gardner