The arches of her feet are bells atop the floor, ‘The telephone’, I say, ‘no it is my toes, I am mistaken, it was a mistake to have walked from the kitchen.’

The dishes crumble; the sad silent song of porcelain wishing for the pumpkin, the stone. ‘Darling,’ I say, but her legs have started upon the hallway.

I awake and have a cigarette, the lampshade blue is broken, hanging from the stiff hips of her waist; blue and blue best is the song this morning in the town where the horns are never as soft as the truffle.

In the shower the water runs upon me, falls into the eye of the tub where time has stuffed the leaves of its mysterious tome which tells of the girl, the boat, the storm which curled her hair and swallowed her whole- the soap the smell of bubbling foreign flowers.

A man approaches me, in his hands a ruffled shirtsleeve. ‘I gather’, he says, ‘that when it storms your arms will need a place to sleep; a button for all the children whose wishes have been similar to yours.’

Beneath the door her breathing, puffing nose- I touch her tiny fingers. ‘Silly girl,’ go an wake your mother, the night has asked that we watch her children the stars, so she may go and wake her sister the sun.

I call upon her sometimes when the sirens whistle. ‘Are you walking,’ I ask, the church bells rolling. ‘The door,’ she says, ‘is broken; from the window the world slowly burning.’

She dreams of the fire escapes on every other building but her own.

The women I can hear below where it is frozen- the immemorial moment when first I climbed the stairs and passed their door.

The girl who I imagine with watercolor eyes the size of the lake tasting of silver tinted mold. I let the smoke fall from the window hoping that it warms her.

I get closer some days watching all the women walking, the linen flowing white, the sound of a morning when not a thing is said but the quiet caress of fluttering eyelids.

I imagine I am old as I write this; my children sleeping, snoring- I am not bothered by the noise. The scent of fresh linen kissed by the midday sun; her hands are ageless, as she places them upon my palms waiting to be kissed in the morning, standing on the tips of her toes.

My love I long to comfort her as she sleeps through the weary night; her faith dissipates into the midnight anemones.

It is not the sadness of tonight, it is what follows.

Perfidious, charming, it is in the way she comes and goes, I lift my lids and she is gone. It is a dream I have had; I have imagined in the orchard of my graying thoughts.

As the night drifts into the soft humid morning, the window is at a pinch; the pulse of the summer heat has started.

The flowers which fall from above- I want to hold her but I do not wish to interrupt. I anticipate the freckles as they shimmer, the fragments of a memory flowing, for as I remember it becomes something different.

In an instant I am carried to the shadow, the shade beneath the tree. I stop some days in the places I will have seen, broken beneath the weight of our autumn toes.

I have a view as of late just before a wall, the vines now flow into the luminous street- I envy the sounds which only my ears can touch, the puddles beneath the feet, the rain, the gutter, rooftops drip dropping above Amaranthine in her pelerine.

- She lay upon the bed, a fallen rose petal, her toes coldly fallen. I touch the hem of the blanket which lay atop her; a fortnight or so it seems longer.

She flickers as the heavy tides of her breath become small. I wonder how much longer. Upon her ear my lips softly touch, talking of the days to come. Her father, his hand upon her. I read to her until she whispers that I stop-sleeping now, her heavy eyes shut.

I am sorry my pet to have forgotten you sitting in the shape of days smoking an enormous cigarette- ‘your sister, the starfish, does she still sleep atop the slumbering bay?’