There were two kinds of mornings
the day you were born.
We had the other.
We whispered about you in bedrooms
and then we talked in kitchens.
We did laundry, folded sheets
thinking about your hands,
how they would be so small.
We paired sock with sock
and then we saw your sister who knew
this was the day she was suddenly big,
bigger than when she went to sleep
because of you,
how you would see her,
all that you would need.
We all thought about what you’d need,
so we arranged flowers, rode in boats,
cleaned sinks, bought apples and washed them.
We talked about your tiny feet
and then your damp-dark hair.
Your morning was water and light,
warm voices and, for the first time, taste.
Ours was final preparation, final prayer,
other things in the world that wanted you,
waited on you,
for Janet Begin from the premise that your life’s your own again and you are free to tear through reedy fields shouting now, now, now at diving chickadees as if you were a dog awakened after death passed by, and now, all paws akimbo, means this time a sacred work, a wishing well, a friend…
Books of advice, magazines, secret cures, formulae, strident pages stiff-legged and shouting expert in the public square of the indomitable truth, snapshots of the honeymoon, paradise in silhouettes, champagne, a silver script: it all flares up so eagerly to flame, takes the match like a lover’s hand hungry to dissolve. How urgent to abandon others…
I like walking the house at night, my husband asleep beside my absent shape. I would use the word secret, but it makes him restless, as though he were a child and I used the word tomorrow; as though he were dying and I used the word tomorrow. I walk the house I built before…
Third Draft: In the Absence of a Word for a Woman Who Is Not a Mother “Your dream, then, is of a nothingness where an investment of love lives on.” ~ Charles D’Ambrosio Under the pitted crust of April snow, blind and rooting, everything waits. Even my resolve not to have babies, elegy, effigy, small…
Nine chickadees hunch in the packed snow of a tire track picking spilled seed. They look so suddenly earthbound, as if they are what scatters from the sack, blind in January sun, sharp scribbled feet stuck in the drift, so many careless darts – I laugh and laugh. Love comes to this: forgetting our wings,…
Three, today, is the happy morning number of soggy robins in the closest tree, new blooms on damp petunias, cups of tea I’ll drink as I thumb Genesis, again, to keep on learning how creation’s never through. On the third day God made ocean and dry land, vegetation, plants and trees – mad synthesis of…
