A gaggle of girls

A gaggle of girls



You children,
with your little loud voices,
let it echo all over the grass.
How joy comes to your small hands,
your crouching secret giggles
and your hair-band wrists.
How does it feel?

All the palm fronds and the shivering grass
are long hair leaning backward,
as if the earth were being tilted.
The lily pads lifted up like napkins.
Dipping their doe legs in the pond.
Its smudge-brown doesn’t paint them;
they come out like the backs of fish.
Sunny hair and bunched up underwear
they leave water thumb-prints
on the gray stones.
Round dimples of stickers
all up their arms.

You little girls
with your great big souls.
Your bodies know things that
mine has forgotten.
My body knows my hips
and my thighs.

Sometimes
it feels like the unbounded earth.
The roundness
and the cool darkness inside of plums.
Like the touching of all other women’s bodies
in the holding
and folding
and laying down of my own.

One afternoon in the grass
you’ll lay an arm across one breast
and I’ll ask you,
How does it feel now,
these things your body knows?