fruitful we are fallen into words flimsy female language a dialect of oranges and asters we say flowery because of the light insubstantial purple swollen plums of language that are read as purple prose and to be newly in leaf and blossom to be fresh picked a budding rose is to be light womanly there is no non-gendered language though even the presence of the word gender and its other hidden face already weigh down this leafy construction I am left wordless unable to explain my fertile ovulating conceiving gestating labouring delivering lactating body I should stop trying for more formidable words more heavy-weight dialogue because the language of vegetation of fruit and flowers of ocean and moon is the shape women have taken in language our blood clichéd and rooting us to nature the only way we can be described lungs forced open as if accuracy were an end in itself I don’t know how to live I don’t know clocks and I don’t know leaves yellow in the wide flat palm of prairie to foot hills I am living in I don’t know what part of the country from colours practically unfamiliar what time of day what season I barely know my husband at this altitude in this west how he lives and moves through the high and dry of this air he walks across a river to a downtown job I can’t imagine I don’t know how to live there’s breathing and eating and looking at yellow trees before wind takes their leaves I don’t know how the television can stand itself brewing pictures frenzied crowds forcing open locked doors I don’t know how the barricades can endure I only know my stubborn stretched skin barricading the body and life forcing itself on a flesh coloured wind of shrill oxygen into my daughter’s open mouth the moment she was pulled blue from my slit open abdomen that slim red scalpel line marking me in that second before life begins with breathing I don’t know anything but the body the body of this western city the country of my own body residence of my daughter my heart blood mother in art god sucks life from the breast of the virgin a hard breast held like a lean pear in his hands this picture is christened madonna of humility as if in giving life she is drained of power yet god grows fat on the milk that is mirrored in the painted air above her as stars of the milky way decorate ceilings in church her name is humility as if the milk is not everything this wash of milk from the human mother as if it is not gifted from the body of a woman grafted to the god of the word as if this is not miracle enough these red and gold images stain the wood of the icon etching the holy made flesh the christ the child is grateful at the breast of the queen of heaven god is overwhelmed with the sweet goodness of she who takes away the hurt of his hunger his huge eternal blood mother shrugging away the painted halo as she draws her child to herself and allows him to put away the pain of the world