Baptism/Beth Kephart Poem

The distance between now and then is the ants,
spilled as if from a candy dish
across the wood horizontals of the deck,
and so swiftly organized into cross currents
that I am sent back in time
to the cracked pavement of Ashbourne Hills,
where I sit naked kneed to the sun.

I wear the short pixie hair of a girl
who has not yet come into all her moods.

I have braided the streamers of my brother's new bike.
I have watched him swirl the cul-de-sac
on the balance of two wheels.
I have heard my mother call,
and I am tired out by pride, eyes closed
and socks turned down at the ankle bone,
almost asleep to the dream of a cat nuzzling by.

I am honeysuckle sugar, I am pale, a hollow stem.
The ants are silent, and they come.

I am saved by my own screams,
and by mother's friend. I am lifted up
into Aunt Loretta's arms, carried from the pave,
over the yard, and plunged
into the running-with-water tub of the house
I only just remember the music of.

My dress, my socks, like the black ants drowned.
Something like innocence lost,
something like pride,
except for how, even now,
it is the dream that nuzzles by,

the bend of streaming time,
the distance from then.

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