In the night, she breathes in the fragrance
of sun and breeze, basket of line-dried sheets
as if the fibers had memorized the day—

fair-weather clouds, bees-at-white-clover,
variegated hosta, birdsong, robin’s-egg-blue.
White paint peels from the old garage

the way bark peels from the old silver maple
near the house, tree that tossed in the wind
one rainy Sunday afternoon in May

while she labored, stormy ebb and flow
of the body soothed by the ebb and flow
of leaves. The boy born that day, youngest

of eight, a teenager today. His father’s hair now,
white as a sun-dried sheet. His mother, awake
in the dark, knowing what a basket knows,

carry and hold, how time-lapse goes a day.

Daye Phillippo is a graduate of Purdue University and Warren Wilson MFA for Writers. She is the recipient of a Mortarboard Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Grant, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship for poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Literary Mama, Shenandoah, Chariton Review, Great Lakes Review, Natural Bridge, Presence, and many others. She teaches English at Purdue University and lives with her husband in a creaky, old farmhouse on twenty rural acres in Indiana.