The rocks will have to turn carefully into deer
on the ridge of the hill. Ragged and blacker every night.

The sheep run as a white stain a hand wipes a piece of peel
from the table no from the grey

meadow. Must have been startled by the huge irresolute
creatures. How the hill in the water -

My mother moves as a memory
moves as my mother in the uncertain garden.

Not true: she rinses out a room of glass.
I have her questions:

are you ever woken up with a start without any age
by memories that drip on your forehead
till they become facts. They fit

your name incontrovertibly a street a number and a country
to write on the back of an envelope.

That you are a woman and what that means no you
as you blow-dry the morning and puff a lock

of the past from our forehead with a sigh. You comb knots
from my hair. Don't move. We are so like each other.

Where were we? There
they are on the right. No those are stones.

Translation: 2008, Donald Gardner