At the foot of the download anchored
among
the usual flotsam of ads,
this link: to plastics-express.com who for
a fraction
of the retail price can
solve my underground drainage woes, which
tells me
the software has finally
run amok. Because the article, you see,
recounts
the rescue from a sewage
pipe of Baby 59, five pounds,
placenta still
attached, in Zhejiang
Province, where officials even as I read
are debating
the merits of throwing
the mother in jail. Communal
toilet. Father
nowhere to be found.
The gods in their mercy once
could turn
a frightened girl to
water or a shamed one to a tree,
but they
no longer seem
to take our troubles much
to heart.
And so the men with
hacksaws do their gentle best—consider
the infant
shoulders, consider the lids—
and this one child among millions,
delivered
a second time to what
we still call breathable air, survives
to pull
the chords of sentiment
and commerce.
Don’t make the poem
too sad, says Megan,
thinking at first (we both of us
think) the child
must be a girl or otherwise
damaged, thus (this part she doesn’t
say) like her.
Who is the ground
of all I hope and fear for in the world.
Who’ll buy?
Or as the hawkers
on the pavement used to put it, What
d’you lack?
The download comes with
pictures too. Of workmen, wrenches,
bits of shattered
PVC, and one for whom
the whole of it—commotion, cameras,
IV needle in the scalp—
is not more strange
than ordinary daylight.
Welcome, Number
59. Here’s milk
from a bottle and here’s a nearly
human hand.
From Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2014 (Mariner Books, 2015). Copyright © 2015 by Linda Gregerson. Used with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.