Quiet is what wakes me into accounting
Carol Dorf
One plant droops in the cold
long purple leaves thick stem
could be bromeliad.
What do
I know of plants? She told me
the baby would learn to love
her playpen
a personal space.
Years ago my brother pulled
himself to a stand on the bars
of the pen in the living room —
up and toppling backwards
over and over again.
Silent.
My daughter screamed never
tolerated the pen or the crib
for that matter. A moth flutters
towards cirrus clouds.
Birds —
I hear them can’t see any.
Winter light. Her first word
was bird then bus
an electronic
hum that passed our house
every half hour.
Running water
in the fountain drowns out little.
I would need the ocean.
When I was young
like water
I was a shape shifter oozing
into any closed container.
I am too free
with advice.
It is so hard to listen
to the small plane low in the sky.
A warning
then nothing.
This plant thickens with the rains.
I never could stop being water.
Carol Dorf’s chapbook, “Theory Headed Dragon,” is available through Finishing Line Press. Her chapbook, “Some Years Ask,” is available through Locofo Chaps, Moria Press. Her poetry appears in The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Scientific American and Best of Indie Lit New England. She teaches mathematics in Berkeley, California, and is poetry editor at Talking Writing.
