I’m looking for my bowl of roseleaves stained

by Development. Static. Run your fingers through

lighter petals as they unhinge from pistils.

Seasons pass, like stagnations of dreams about

a rose-garden filled with conspiracies: that an

eight-metre-high sunflower will grow instead,

reach over the wall and migrate into the next,

where we begin again. Picture that.

If you pour water into the bowl and swirl

the petals until your reflection is a dappled reminiscence –

a frameless gateway to a memory where

all the rooms are freshly red, still rendering

into definition while the rest of the sunset loads –

until the petals are bleached and swollen and

drunkenly loll to the surface, you will see that

This is rebirth.

 

I’m looking for my pen that danced along a laundry line across the courtyard,

flagstones staining orange while the sun sunk towards the horizon,

which is that thin thread between yesterday and tomorrow,

looking backwards and forwards. Orange is

what we are right now: the yellow glare of closed shutters

behind; in front, the Redness of branding

figures into photographs, of autumn leaves and

of dying embers, of beginning again.

 

I’m looking for

my drawstring bag of marbles that jingled with childhood and possibilities // the scab you flicked off my leg like lint into the evening (by then yellow at the edges) – it hurt, but you promised blanker skin would blossom from the blood – // the snakeskin which Kaa left on the forest floor one night // the bubble, still raw and full and shivering with fragility in the breeze, before it hardened into a snow globe // the orange pinpricks speckling an immature apple // the tear before it slipped from your eyelid as the pollen swirled in the air like roseleaves.

In short, I’m looking for fragments

of your reflection that I

lost after the sunflower shut out the light.

That’s why I talk about you in the

present tense, Ma.