in the dream where I don’t knowshe is dead, she comes to me and I talk toher about none of the things I want totalk to my dead mom about. she traces an oval on a wax tablet.asked about scale, she answers, the landscape just happenedto be the size of the frame. the visit is shallow or it findsdepth in the places we don’t talk. we spend our timewalking over a field robed in cotton. sound movesfastest in solids. faster in water thanin air. breath, it turnsout, is the slowest medium, and the words Ihave are thick in their churning over. the materialsonly few and so thin. we share a foodbetween us. I wantto have a child if only to clarify the imageshe weaves—a suit that happensto be just the size of my body. I sew a shadowto each petal with a curvedquilting needle. amplitudeand speed, I am telling you, are unrelated. my nameis the last name my mother refusedto change. so as not to lose you, the hospitallists your name with your mother’s on yourbaby wristlet. thislife is a repetition that knowsno bounds, tracing a tablet into a waxingoval that spirals outward. seed of aseed sowing itself into the ground. this namejust happens to be the size of the concept growing. gestureis a manner of carrying a body, and space openedto sky in the recess of her breathing as shecame up from the water, a filmbreaking over the ridge of her nose. moving betweenwater and air, the exhalation faster than her body, I remembershe is dead.                               a tree is taken from its halo ofneedles. a red candle drops an oval around itselfonto cloth.