There’s the thin yellow door to Shoalwood.
There’s a pill-bottomed girl on the stoop. 
There’s a june-bug, wet  & uncupping her wings.
	But where is your mother?
You cannot remember, you mindless juice mongrel,
how you called and she came
	and you called and she came,
and you learned to sing yourself awake,
and the house opening up, unbuttoning
each humid breast in turn.
		Oh, it was me!
I sang that house alive, 
learned to unleash love’s wet mouth.
I was that baby tucked up in the rafters,
long gown made of milk which dripped and caught
hems on the plateless light-switch,
child born of inflexible guilt, appetite
	heaving its dark sump across the planks.
		Oh, it was me! 
The girl who never learned to say “four”
without unraveling her swampy tongue,
her first room shining forth like a woody fist,
moonlight scuttling across the floor to flatten
each raisin-backed tree roach glistening.
		Oh, it was me! 
A bean for a penny, a song for a bean—
Whose forehead cropped bright mushrooms in the night,
whose tongue and ears drew in to hide the hoard,
whose knees were tender as cooking onions,
who, mindless, filled anything hollow:
	a suitcase,
		a stomach,
			a bed.