It's OK.
No, no, let's not.
It's too dangerous.
I've brought a jinx with me to the state.
"Stone Soup."
"But first, she has to get born, so she invents a mother
to hold the long wooden wand of a cooking spoon
fast in her fist.
She invents the big black zero of the iron pot,
the stone of the pig's knuckle, the buzz of the fridge,
the tap scalding the soap into suds, the tureen dunked again,
and again.
She invents the tintin tabulation of the milkman's
bottles in their wire basket, and the sigh of the clutch
as he disappears, and the match that touches
the gas burner, the blue root, the little tiara
of yellow fire.
Beyond the window it is nearly dark.
A sudsy ocean is coughing up a beach as hard and gray as
poured concrete.
She has set herself this task, like a train lugging
its hard body toward Portland.
So she now must make a father's coat,
come home from the day shift, its pockets drooping
like the jowls of a hound, and his long black shoes
with their dew of glitter under the fluorescent light
of the breakfast nook, his mustache
like a school janitor's broom.
She begins as talk of labor, and of wages.
His big hand turning over the leaves of the light,
and water bills like a boring book,
and it will not be long now until she
will make them make her from nothing, from a stone,
from a pot."