On the news:

the body of a woman has been found.

I am disarmed by the neat calculation

of her personhood, as though

she was human minus mind

divided by immaterial.

My child asks how they will remove his tonsils,

looks at the cut on his hand and feels

he is opening up dangerously.

The surgeon will use—

I am lost for words; how not to frighten him.

Tweezers? he offers, and it sounds less like cutting

so I say, Yes.

At night he sees venomous toads

piercing him with spears:

a liminal translation of the frog in his throat

that will be executed;

or, is he thinking of creation?

After the question about the tonsils

he asks me how the sperm gets into the egg

and I start to say,

When a man and a woman love each other very much,

but I recognise in his surprise—

in my desire to answer with

cartography or mathematics—

a wilful misdirecting of us both

away from

the dark lake of his dreams.