Next to her the one I married. She sleeps soundly with the alarm a waiting devil. Much has been mentioned about the clock and its special button. She will rise and drive over two bridges to make the other side of the bay. She sleeps on her stomach. We are in our niece’s room with the alphabet animals ringing her walls, up there by the ceiling. Hannah once had the W removed because it’s a wolf. Scared to death of the wolf, she implored me “No, no, please don’t be the big bad wohff.” My wife sleeps on her stomach in pink pajamas next to the wall. A shirt hangs on a doorknob. The guy reads a Robert Bly simply titled “Selected Poems,” that collection with “Walking Swiftly” in it, the prose poem that describes everything in my world and yours. The same used book with the card stock mark in it that says “Dear Allis/ This brought me delight/ I hope it does you too!/ Love Anne.” The mark from that store in Hermosa Beach. That time Anne went there and bought her Bly. There was a spark of love. I see the Zebra and the Yellowhammer. There are Hannah’s impressed feet in 6/01, shy of her one-month birthday. Hanging from a nail. See more letters in the mirror, but they’re backwards. There’s a Newt, we can tell that much. She’s sleeping on an air mattress in her parents’ bedroom. At dinner she sang a holiday song about Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. That there’s Swahili. She sang it through her stuffed doggy and made my wife cry.
