Last night I get all the way to Ocean Street Extension, squinting through the windshield, wipers smearing the rain, lights of the oncoming cars half-blinding me. The baby’s in her seat in the back singing the first three words of You’re the Top. Not softly and sweetly the way she did when she woke in her crib, but belting it out like Ethel Merman. I don’t drive much at night anymore. And then the rain and the bad wipers. But I tell myself it’s too soon to give it up. Though the dark seems darker than I ever remember. And as I make the turn and head uphill, I can’t find the lines on the road. I start to panic. No! Yes—the lights! I flick them on and the world resolves. My god, I could have killed her. And I’ll think about that more later. But right now new galaxies are being birthed in my chest. There are no gods, but not everyone is cursed every moment. There are minutes, hours, sometimes even whole days when the earth is spinning 1.6 million miles around the sun and nothing tragic happens to you. I do not have to enter the land of everlasting sorrow. Every mistake I’ve made, every terrible decision—how I married the wrong man, hurt my child, didn’t go to Florence when she was dying—I take it all because the baby is commanding, “Sing, Nana.” And I sing, You’re the top. You’re the Coliseum, and the baby comes in right on cue.

When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away—
relocated they call it—
their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming.
Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart,
twisted knot, hot blood rivering
to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet.
Just weeks before
I watched a bear and her cubs run down a mountain
in the twilight.
So buoyant, they seemed to be tumbling
to the meadow,
to the yarrow root they dug, rocking
to wrest it from the hard ground, fattening for winter.
They were breathing what looked like gladness.
But that other mother . . .
Her massive head raised, desperate to catch their scent.
Each footfall a fracture in the earth’s crust.

Work in the early morning but at 3 A.M.
when I’m wide awake, holding you in my arms,
time is a debt that will never be forgiven us.
For whatever night is left, our bodies draping
the peeled leather couch, your head tilts up toward
mine in still sleep & I tuck in my ear to bridge
the farness of your breathing, faint & steady,
as if you were giving me flashes of your life
without words. I want there to be nothing
which exists beyond this room, save the thrush
obligato at dawn & the past that has made me
fragile enough to feel the time bend in your hold
but once my eyes map the ceiling there’s no hope
for desire to remake life in our light-shorn image.
I begin to think about all those ancient epics
where the heroes rather become infinite than fall in love,
narrowly conquering death at the expense of glimpsing
any heaven worth living for, betraying wind, staking
silver through their own humanity. For a moment I find myself
bent on one of us becoming exactly like that—undying
& indeterminate, god-renowned & never gaining, never
losing—but something pulls me back when your hand,
even in sleep, reaches a part of my neck which has a pulse
I’ve almost forgotten, lingers as if you were making
an afterlife with your touch, says we are here even
where we are gone, going, & the world means nothing.
Who cares what I have failed to become.
I will die knowing that
we lived forever.