When I was made of wood

I was a boat that held the boy’s body
and rocked it under weeping osiers,
a lullaby whose only word was water.
I was a stage that framed an orchestra
for the boy, jazz and marches, Dada.
I was the barn beside an old road,
stuffed with hay and cats and oats
filled with rays of sunshine,
spiders on all my wooden bones.

I was the ark bringing the animals, the pencil
holding words, I was his bed made
of holm-oak, owls carved in its posts.
I was the tree holding fruits higher than his hands,
the swing where he wrote with his feet in the sky.
I was the bowl and the barrel, the bin and the box,
the bark and the bucket full of boy to the brim—
and then I was the coffin cut to fit the boy
just born, born dead. I carried him.

Molly Bashaw grew up in New England and upstate NY, and has lived abroad since 2000.
Her book of poetry is called "The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It".