1.
In my Mother's Day gift book
How Much I Love My Mama
my ten-year-old lists the usual, and then —
I love my Mama more than a fish loves water.
Green seaweeds awash in blue,
a purple fish who says I love water
in a yellow bubble.
Don't fish assume water?
Can it be his sould remembers
floating in me?
Does it occur to the fish
there is an end to water?

I see myself an ocean,
wave rippled spine
holding back
the sky chasm.

2.
Her questions come from the backseat,
or across the table, as I witness
history's slowest recorded consumption of peas.

Mama, how is fourteen a number?
What happens
to the whale bodies when they die —
do they just pile up
on the bottom of the ocean?
Why doesn't the glue stick
inside the tube?
Do you ever wonder
if it's really night
and you're just dreaming?

And then in bed, just before
the waves of sleep
close over her head:
Mama,
how long
is day?

3.
The bubbles have softened her up,
soaked off our fight earlier that day.
She offers to take down
the I Hate Mom signs taped up in her room,
even the one adding: I Mean It.
Nice touch, her brother had grinned at dinner.

4.
The children are so
small inside their needs.
They can barely see
over the top. My son
inside his smooth ten-year-old body
comes to announce his hunger,
confident I will fill it. He doesn't
see mine.

5.
On the shore together we learn that water
won't be refused.

The hands of my children
scoop and smooth mounds of sand
but always a few grains slide backwards.
Each pat calls forth
its own washing away.

The hands of the waves
play scales in the sand
over and over and never
the same twice.

6.
You take them to swimming lessons
so they learn to float
above their fear, how long it's safe to hold
their breath. You try to make them buoyant
and wise. You teach them to look always

for the things seen only by squinting, to notice
when the earth opens and offers things
and to heed the river songs,
the ones that tell how rivers die
daily into the life of oceans.
It is the oceans
that store the heat,
send the storms.