Staring down water, a glow
under pressure, a clover
pressed inside a book,
except light can’t be thinned
and dried like that.
We shine best backwards
and I remember
colours running into each other,
a picture more splendid
than my child mind
could invent, but I made it,
                             spreading
its wildfire over the paper.
History is a vertical slide
and a teacher once asked me to say
                      I am six years old
praised my accent
as if it wasn’t
            my first language.
I still prefer oils to build
a texture more absolute
than a photograph, say
the one of my family in Brussels.
Cat’s eyes transfix
a motorway near the border,
my sister chanting times tables
in French even after
                                we left,
my brother lucent in the corridor.
What I mean is, while I thought
it was lamps in the water,
it was firefly squid all along.
You see, we were real
or what passes for it.