For Brendan

I knew her first as the rhythm
          of her cane on the floor above—faint
lexicon of creaks and taps that let me
          invent her cramped apartment—the certain
television, the recliner and withered

          ottoman she sidesteps to the kitchen.
But it’s my neighbor’s laugh that turns
          the ceiling’s thick plaster to rice paper,
the same laugh that, outside, calls to her heels
          her scooter- and trike-propelled tribe

of neighborhood children, this extended family
          she’s adopted because polio’s kept her from kids
of her own. Outside the grocery she asks
          about my sister’s second child. Two years
of agencies, I answer, and still paperwork’ll

          keep him from her arms for weeks.
                                                                   Texas,
a transitional family, and another imagined
          room—portable crib, plush mobile
dangling from the respirator, and a rainbowed
          circus whirls to his charted pulse.

The sweet anxieties of early parenthood.
          Two decades of marriage, it’s 1975,
and my mother starts the new year
          with her own troubled pregnancy,
the early delivery that may not be early

          enough. First hours on the other side of labor,
and a clergy absolves the failing child—
          prayers, fogging the surface of a plastic
womb, blur his gestures to vague curves.
          Then, once the child’s prepared

for heaven, the doctors do their best
          to delay his trip, and he’s wheeled away
to the last of four transfusions, the one
          that finally sustains him. Those anonymous
donors, their blood bagged and chilled

          to come alive again in me—I’ve never wondered
until today what their names might be,
          what community of fluids cruises my veins.
Little one, all this to tell you something simple:
          we’re of one blood. The grocery’s lights

fizzle and fade. My neighbor’s dark skin deepens
          to twilight. I’m walking her home, a bag
in each hand, and she’s describing
          the milk, eggs, flour, and the buttered
cornbread they’ll become. When I pull out

          the photo of a child, curled, almost,
into a fist-sized ball, she props her cane
          against her door. Ain’t that something, she says,
and laughs one of her two-syllabled laughs
          that truly means ain’t that something.

Then she pauses, looks at the ground,
            and honey, she says, talking, now, almost
to herself, if you knelt each time
          a miracle passed your eyes,
you’d never get off your knees.