Parenthood

Hunched in the bath, four ibuprofen gulped
too late to dull the muscle cramping
to sate a god who thirsts
monthly for his slake of iron,
I am just a body bleeding in bad light.

The leaves talked in the twilight, dear;
Hearken the tale they told:
How in some far-off place and year,
Before the world grew old,

I was a dreaming forest tree,
You were a wild, sweet bird
Who sheltered at the heart of me
Because the north wind stirred;

At the end of my stepfather’ s life
when his anger was gone,
and the saplings of his failed
nursery had grown into trees,
my newly feminist mother had him
in the kitchen to pay for all
those years he only did the carving.
“You know where that is,”
she would say as he looked
for a knife to cut the cheese
and a tray to serve it with,
his apron wide as a dress
above his workboots, confused
as a girl. He is the one I think of now,
lifting the tray for my family,
the guests, until at last he comes

In Japan, when you die, they wheel
what’ s left of you out of the incinerator,
and what’ s left of your family takes turns
picking with special chopsticks.
It looks like they have gathered to dine
over a dead campfire, but they are not,
of course, eating you. They are feeding you
to the round mouth of an urn:
only in pieces, Father, to the fire.
In their bright swimsuits,
my daughters spill warm sand over my skin
as I lie still, watching the sun
needle the sky. The baby licks her fingers

The child’ s assignment:
“What is a city?”
All dusk she sucks her pencil
while cars swish by
like ghosts, neighbors’ radios
forecast rain, high clouds,
diminishing winds: at last
she writes: “The city is everyone.”
Now it’ s time
for math, borrowing and exchanging,
the long discipleship
to zero, the stranger,
the force that makes us

You wept in your mother's arms
and I knew that from then on
I was to forget myself.

The bad mother wakes from dreams
of imperfection trying to be perfection.
All night she’s engineered a train
too heavy with supplies
to the interior. She fails.
The child she loves
has taken on bad habits, cigarettes
maybe even drugs. She
recognizes lies. You don’t
fool me, she wants to say,
the bad mother, ready to play
and win.
This lamb who’s gone –
this infant she is
pinioned to – does not listen,
she drives with all her magic down a
different route to darkness where

Each could picture probably
with great care his brother drawing
the corded string of a watered silk bag
and mumbling to Basho above the keepsake
pay your respects to mother's white hair
now your eyebrows look a little white too
but all have turned instead to watch this child
a girl my daughter Simone
an astute migrant
skimming the stream of days
toted wherever she wants

If no one ever marries me, —
And I don't see why they should,
For nurse says I'm not pretty,
And I'm seldom very good —

If no one ever marries me
I shan't mind very much;
I shall buy a squirrel in a cage,
And a little rabbit-hutch:

I shall have a cottage near a wood,
And a pony all my own,
And a little lamb quite clean and tame,
That I can take to town:

And when I'm getting really old, —
At twenty-eight or nine —
I shall buy a little orphan-girl
And bring her up as mine.

The way my daughter sleeps it’s as if she’s talking
to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll
backwards in her head, her senses fold

one by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat.
Every night she fights this silent way of being
with all the whining ammunition that she has.

She wins a tired story, a smothered song, the small
and willful links to life that carry her away.
Welcome to the Egyptian burial. She’s gone to Hades