You’re Minding My Mice Again is a care poem, a medley of words and images surrounding the care we receive from the people, places, and things that surround us, a celebration of co-dependence of everything and everybody.
You’re Minding My Mice Again – Care Poem
While I'm away, you're minding my mice again and pruning the branches and making beds in the soil for the tulips. And at high tide, the moon's pulling the oceans and washing the flood gates and carving holes in the rocks for kelp forests. A nook exists for squids and sparrows for brambles and thorny bushes. While I'm asleep, binmen clear away my rubbish and songbirds chatter and twigs are reaching for the stars. And in the morning, the sun's baking the apples and drying all the wet faces and heating city pavements in time for the bums. A time rises for swallows and sharks, for roses and hummingbirds. While I'm sweating, butterflies fan my face and the wind cools my skin and the rain's torrent fills my bowl for our stroll. And in the evening, street lights are watching the foxes and minding the children and holding the roads for you and me. A flare shoots up for cows and kids, for orchids and seahorses.
[…] First, she fed my child a nut, and after that she grew sprouts under her skin, of grain and roses and earthworms. Circling, she blew fire into our stoves, and on hot stones, she fried green apples and sewed up lacerated skins. Mother’s pliés and pirouettes scattered stars into place, she weaved air and light into a feathery cloth and lay it down upon reedy swamps and moonlit highways. On branches too and where the breeze draughts the round room inside arms allongés. Allegretto. And now an Adagio, she's wrestling us down, she's swallowing us into her lap where she can stroke our wiery heads mid-arabesque, one by one. Naptime, she's making us sink, she's slowing us to sleep in the deep of her cot, she's giving us to her circles and lullabies. Along the grooves of her fingerprints, birdsong and light capering and in her dimples, the scores of lento airs. Already, the sky is strumming and the land gliding its bow on our bedding veins. We drip into the clinging ocean, one by one. […]