Children’s Rehabilitation Center

When my husband worked there
we were given the use of the pool;
afternoons I would bring my first son
to kill time, not going in much myself,
like the patients too crippled to swim.

Slumped among mothers, I tried
to join in their talk; my voice creaked
like broken swings in the playground
where willows dragged their limp arms on the lawn.
Sometimes a young paraplegic would be wheeled out
in the sun, and my gaze would drift off
toward the town we’d just moved from,
the one job I hated to leave, at a bookstore.

And each time a big blue sedan drove by
my heart raced, thinking it could be the owner,
my boss, seeking me out like a lost sheep,
bringing me an affair, secret passion,
or giving me back my position, my paycheck—

either way he could hand me my life,
because mothers and children were nothing
in my own eyes, as I languished by the pool
like the one in the Bible, and waited for the angel
to trouble the waters, so I could enter and be healed.