ISSUE: Spring 1995
Robin-song loud at the bedroom window,
a three-note descant
over the weak groundnote of my newborn
daughter’s milk-cry.
She nurses, I lie waiting my turn at
the changing table,
the bird’s variations wash over our bodies
in pre-dawn dark:
Rich or poor, the song goes, better, worse,
sickness and death,
it comes down to this separate piece
of self and wife
that lies by our bed in a wicker basket
dividing each night
into three-hour wakes. Limp, milk-heavy,
she’s handed to me.
Grief, I think, has the voice of a robin
but its hands are human:
each touch of my daughter already part
of an ongoing goodbye
for the way she’ll quicken through dependence
into a country
I won’t be living in. Grief, at my age, grows
full-sized in seconds—
in my arms this morning, she seems already
memorial, forgone.
I carry her downstairs to the changing table.
My bare feet count
the steps down, my arms balance us both,
but it’s her need
carrying me.I’m not a monk carrying water,
dawn after dawn,
to a shrine. I can save her from nothing. She
is not my elegy.
I take the steps. It’s not the robin-song
that’s changing me.
