cup

"she learned to cup ______________ in her _________" so I'm        thinking we need to two things in writing this piece

        1) we have to fill in the blanks

        2) we have to use the line in the poem at least once

she left no footprints

of mud on the kitchen floor,

 she told me, before she died

(it was summer anyway, just before my birthday)

I would have, she told me, kept

that footprint,

encased it in plaster of paris, like an archeologist staring in reverence at the divinity of a brand-new life.

this one, she told me, never leaves footprints.

she is like those shadow people I hear spoken of when I awake at two thirteen in the middle of the night; there must be a kind of comfort in having shadow dogs live

with you, she told me.

they never go away.

they always leave mud

on your kitchen floor

and you can look at it for as long as you want.

and she wanted, I think, to look

but she couldn’t.

I don’t think shadows are real.

when I saw her some years later

we again

spoke of shadows

she told me she learned to cup those shadows in her occipital lobe  and let them out,

 like finely tatted lace,

in the finely carved  light of dawn.