Pillbugs clench under the cracked slate of the garden.
Massive clippers: their whisk --snip
heavy in the slowing repetitions of August.
The child in the tiger lilies looks up.
One silence is the shuddering ladder; another,
the father’s white, unfamiliar muscles
against the dark hedge.
*
Tame light, the apparition of driveways.
Soft brown, milky white, yellow garages;
neat perimeters, backyards.
What’s missing is the violent perfection of the shadows,
and I mentally paint them in—shadows
from the skinny poplars, inert cars.
*
At bedtime the child,
thinking of the father’s muscles, asks
could you kill me? --no.
I mean, could you choke me, could
you squeeze me so hard that I would die?
He sense that his yes is necessary
for her to be sure of him, and his yes is brief,
face flickering with something I can’t identify in memory.
He pulls the blanket to her chin
before brushing a strand of hair from her forehead
and leaving the room.
The open windows are two wide eyes
flat against the mild dark.
*
The child is forbidden the second door
of her bedroom, which opens to the porch roof.
Sometimes she walks out, asphalt shingles
waving unevenly under her bare feet. If it is evening
the heat from the roof rises slowly up her legs
in the cool air. She stays close to the door,
close to the breath of the house.
--Joy Katz, 2000