with homage and thanks to Mary Oliver

unless you have a toddler

in which case you do at least three times

a day, spray bottle in one hand, dish cloth

in the other, milk and pickle rinds

your easy target under the wooden high chair.

You do not have to walk on your knees

unless your child whines Mommy, plaaay

and opens the box of pom poms with no other goal

than to spread them across the living room carpet,

your one life—previously wild and precious—now scattered

like cotton prisms over the floor, like the clean laundry

your child has roughed and heaped over his body.

You pick at the topmost layer, sort it into piles.

Giggles bubble from the depths of dish rags.

When he bursts to the surface,

ready for lunch, you pause. You watch

as he climbs into his chair, his spoon

transformed into some airship,

your ladleful of pasta shells emptying onto his plate

as he moves the spoon through space

with an ascending uuuuhhhhhhhhHHH?

his cosmic mouth extending past its own corners

like the hand that moves the spoon past the boundaries

of this dimension, past that atmospheric

break where spoon becomes satellite,

where it falls into orbit around the mouth

of your child, in other words: the sun.

Ariel Friedman is a cellist, composer, and poet. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pangyrus, december, Poetica, and Soundings East. Most recently, she was selected for a workshop with Marge Piercy and won the Women Composers Festival of Hartford’s 2020 call for scores. She is working on her first chapbook.