My father and my mother and I
were one God indivisible until
finally, swelling and splitting in half
like a sexual cell
half of my mother grew into you.

You looked like a girl who to my memory
resembles a Siamese cat—
she left for work at seven a.m., an open bottle
in her bag, her duffle coat on the rack
to perfume my house that whole winter
with its perennial scent.

(But yours was the first face
I ever saw, before when our family
was a stone Trinity facing out
three ways from one inscrutable centre.)

Then by your coming with a calendar
and black pen were we
de-hypostasised and made flesh. Our parents
were a while uneasy, at last remembering
a floccule of sun found caught in a fence
whom they had taken in.