This is not my making any ecstatic,
sleep-deprived screed
affirming what is reincarnation.
Yet for so many throbs of my heart
during the self-pitying pre-dawn hours, I have
watched you on the infant monitors
etched in night-
vision green. You sit up like a flummoxed soul
newly returned to the Earth’s cradle—
panning, without panic,
the geometry of your blue-
walled nursery.
Outside, the sun waits to rise so that humankind can continue ending.
I am tired but not
foolish enough to presume
the gaze you have—one that lathes the hard dark like a lighthouse beam—
is one ignorant of our waning world.
Matteroffact: She has landed here before,
I think. Your brain a box unboxing
old maps half-true, half-useless atop the freshly burned
skin of nations. Lie back down—
though you are not
animated by some trance to be dislodged from.
Relent—
that, too, you never do.
How chafing the bed to one who has already lived a lifetime
worth of nightmare and dreaming? You soon convince
yourself to throw over one pajama’d leg
and lift your body across the crib rail’s ledge.
You plummet—breaching into the day’s painful
boundlessness, drawn again to this
irresistible pilgrimage of falling.