The Raspberry Room

It was solid hedge, loops of bramble and thorny

as it had to be with its berries thick as bumblebees.

It drew blood just to get there, but I was queen

of that place, at ten, though the berries shook like fists

in the wind, daring anyone to come in. I was trying

so hard to love this world—real rooms too big and full

of worry to comfortably inhabit—but believing I was born

to live in that cloistered green bower: the raspberry patch

in the back acre of my grandparents’ orchard. I was cross-

stitched and beaded by its fat, dollmaker’s needles. The effort

of sliding under the heavy, spiked tangles that tore

my clothes and smeared me with juice was rewarded

with space, wholly mine, a kind of room out of

the crush of the bushes with a canopy of raspberry

dagger-leaves and a syrup of sun and birdsong.

Hours would pass in the loud buzz of it, blood

made it mine—the adventure of that red sting singing

down my calves, the place the scratches brought me to:

just space enough for a girl to lie down.