I must've tugged her from the village where her mother
sold fruit near fountains,
where her father pulled
lemons from clouds, because
she said, Go back to sleep.
I had climbed out of my
crib, ran to her bed,
her hair a black dress
on her pillow.
Ma, I said, cows are biting me.
A wide-eyed rubber calf
stared at me all night.
It felt like a hot eye
on my belly.
When I was older
she told me her mother
couldn't touch peaches.
The fuzz, she said, burned her hand. So she'd put an apple slice
in her wine and a bellyache
in her milk.
What does that mean,
I said. I don't know,
she said. Forget it.
This was part of a dialogue
we had all her life,
half sentences in cream.
When I told her that Dutch
settlers planted chives
for their cows to flavor milk,
and when a farmer shot
a woman from the Wappinger
tribe for stealing a peach
from a tree in his garden,
the Peach War ensued
three hundred years before my birth. She said, You're not mine.