--- L A U R A   H O P E -G I L L

I want to paint myself here,
make it permanent.

I'd need the brush of
sleep to mix on the

primordial palette of rock
grown hot like me with the sun.

I'd need the smell
of the water, this water I've

returned to, this water my 
skin never forgot it breathes.

The canvas would have to be 
the size of memory stretched

so taut across my bones
that only the moss and its chatter

of camps where girls are mean
and the only birth of my daughter

can cover it. I'd paint myself
at 36, the story of my breasts

and hair, all this evidence of a 
changing life, and in the same

single stroke,
recall the glacial shifts, add a

whisper of loon, a pine, a chasm,
and an hour.