Noodles for the Moon

In her kitchen on the steps of our building,
my daughter makes noodles for the moon:
sticks for soba, wide agapanthus leaves
for udon, and their purple trumpet blossoms
for macaroni. A nearly empty bottle,
a sip of water for the moon. She is the chef
and the server and runs the restaurant —
“Mama, sit down.” She points at my spot
on the stairs. “Papa, sit down.”
Whimsy has rules and she will enforce them.
We create each other’s weather, the back-
and-forth tides that buoy and drag us through
each day. Between jacaranda branches,
the moon looks down like a grandmother
who has finished enforcing anything,
all love and letting go. She knows
a gift when she sees it. She knows
we won’t always be so young, so tired,
so close that when dinner service ends
we will hold hands and climb the stairs
to our apartment, draw mermaids
on the walls of the bathtub, and fall asleep,
our bodies curled together into crescents.