How can we be experiencing catastrophes,
hurricanes that come in many guises, rumbling,
whipping up and electrifying air
with hatreds as old as humans,
but not quite
as old as rain.
When the late afternoon sun skips
through your hair whorling
it from its usual acorn
into golden copper nests?

Spun sugar curls glinting, see-through.
Unclear which is light, or hair. Static dendritic
filaments zip-lining into air.
Are you there? More than real.
Figment of whim I want to live
between the fragments of already fallen leaves
floating lazy, like dust motes
where you are both sunbeam
and my child,
full of spit and kick.

Fluttering in and out of self
constructed worlds you chitter about
from the level of my hip.
Spinning in drafts of strange weather
systems at our nearby edge only ceasing
when your twig limbs sink heavy in my arms so
deeply drunk with the day only sleep can contain
all the questions, definitions, declarations: “I am
a honeybee, a hummingbird, a duckling. A fairy
queen. A frog”.