We worry whether stones remain solid or melt in milk.
Open eyes & open mouths, a flood from the cupboards.

The children's wrists twined with the lowing of frightened mules.
Grasses arch into jump ropes & circle their little legs.

They open their panic & floodwater spills into vases, clatters with soaked gauze.
Tell me when we've reached the edge of the cascading rock.

Tell me when the water bounces like ball bearings on your dry skin,
when your bedframe breaks from a sweat-heavy blanket.
The carpets are dense with dandelion milk & salad leaves scatter the sofa.

There is a barrel outside that empties & empties like birdsong
trapped in a blue jay's beak, lodged in the belly of a drowned snake.

We rake the ground into trails our fingers follow. A capgun snapping
our ears back to higher ground, webbed dry with reeds.

Little legs scuff soft mud. Curb their canvas sandals on the fallen
cornstalks & collapse into the mud-holes. 

Grass gone white from water & poison snake up from the oilwell.
Can these stones float to the surface of the bedroom. Stones engraved
with the family names remain solid or leak into the memory box.

We've sweat through our own skin to wring over the lilacs.
Milk curdles in a drawer as silverware dries & the barn empties out.

A glass of water on the nightstand shrinks into a bullet hole.
The stones collapse into floodwaters & trees begin to leak.

The fields swirl with waterbirds flinging their sloppy bodies
from rock to the rocks, just as rocks fill with milk. 

We cannot protect the bubbles escaping the children's mouths.
All this time we worried, it was over the wrong thing.