Edges of teapots and fruit dishes
made presentable.
I mothered bluebirds from lifeless liquid.
From cast moulds cream necks stemmed, a wing,
two eyes, clay skeletons firing in the kiln.
Many would fold, cleft beaks, bubbles in the spine,
children I buried with the wastage.
Some lived to be glazed in a frost-blue coat.

I fettle, work words.
Shaving, replacing, whittling away
at the bone, back-bent. I peel the bark
of tree stumps, thread smoke through the needle eye.
Picking wild oats with dirt tracks on my palms
I weed the changes in me, out.
The moth floating dead in the glass like a star,
a golden cross when the sun comes.
Some lines leap, some die, lungs full of ink.

But here I place the bluebird, a solitary tack
on a cork board, and its wings flutter a little between blinks.
It whispers will you remember me tomorrow?
I ask the same of my flock of broken loves,
blueprints stained with coffee and dust.
These are the measurements, incisions.
These are beginnings and ends,
stacked lines, trimmings of trying.