Like the bright swallows flying low
            I can only skim my reflections
in the sky-mirrored stream, my face

becomes my mother’s or dream-
            daughter’s, there’s no girl-child
to someday see me looking back

no dark hair to braid with feathers.
            Is this the river of my mother’s protest
song or my grandmother’s gospel?

No telling—gonna lay down my burden
            down by the riverside—
I never sang it to my son

though I don’t have a name for why
            he won’t see me in the mirror
why I spared him this rush.

Like the membrane of a cell, water
            forms skin for the Jesus-bug to skate on
the boundary between us that thin—