Probable Poem for the Furious Infant

Probably you’ll solve gravity, flesh 
out our microbiomics, split our God 
particles into their constituent bits 
of christs and antichrists probably, 
probably you’ll find life as we know it 
knitted into nooks of the chattering 
cosmos, quaint and bountiful as kismet 
and gunfights in the movies probably, 
probably, probably you have no patience
for the movies there in your eventual 
arrondissement where you have more
credible holography, more inspiring
actual events, your ghazals composed 
of crow racket, retrorockets, glaciers 
breaking, your discotheques wailing
probably, probably, probably, probably 
too late a sentient taxi airlifts you 
home over a refurbished riverbank, 
above the rebuilt cathedral, your head 
dozing easy in the crook of your arm,
emptied of any memory of these weeks 
we haven’t slept you’ve been erupting 
into that hereafter like a hydrant on fire, 
like your mother is an air raid, and I am 
an air raid, and you’re a born siren 
chasing us out of your airspace probably
we’ve caught 46 daybreaks in 39 days, 
little emissary arrived to instruct us,
we wake now you shriek us awake,
we sleep now you leave us to sleep.

Related Poems

Genesis

Like any mother I lived for my children. Bone of my bones, gave them my body as house, gave them my house as home. I was fruitful. I multiplied. Nothing was ever my own and I called this sacrifice, devotion. What I called them became their names. Some grew and some did not. Some were angry and some were not. Some murdered, some tended the flocks, some built boats to escape the flood. Some built towers into the sky. Some became pillars of salt. I fed them by the sweat of my brow. Some needed more than I could give them, though I saved only thorns and thistles for myself. God was a voice in the sky with no tree to burn. God was a shower of burning sulfur, a snake winding through the dirt. If I had a moment to spare, I might have bent to hear what he was saying.

Annus Mirabilis

           For X.


From the shallows our son watches me play 
dead. He sits on river rocks chucking sand, 
burying strawberries while I float down-
stream, breath wound bright in the gut, a body

both here and of other waters. The day
he was born, midwives touched your face, your hands, 
tested nerve and pulse, dripped saline along
your thigh, numbered blades—their ceremony

for the first cuts, before swaddling blankets,
fever syrups, bath time and mud. These are 
places the boy is ticklish: lunette

of the earlobe        kneecaps       madrigal fat 
of his belly       collarbone       toes. These words
he knows, but will not say: yes       horse       sleep       white.


* 

Again the boy cries himself hoarse
as we sing through these hours right 

before dawn. First the alphabet,
then “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” 

then “The Great Pretender.” Our words
like foxes, like milk teeth. We can’t

hold him quiet. His body must,
they say, learn now about hunger,

about being alone. So we
hum and shhh into the yellow

bruise of Sunday, melodies the 
shape of bluets and yearlings, blood 

pudding and this worry, this awe 
we have no name for— 

*

When he asks, make no mention of those names 
we saved for the children we lost—his ghost 
siblings, their phantom initials. Of tests 

and lemongrass, nettle leaf and sharps, forms 
in triplicate, clinics painted with lambs, 
comets, maps to nerve meridians, hearts: 

say nothing. Never speak of that quiet
after the kicking stopped. Believe in time
he’ll learn our cells betray each miracle
and wild conundrum they’re coded to bear.

           If he needs an answer, give him morning 
mass off  W. 16th: how aisle and chancel 
roared with lilies and cornets; how we dared 
a new unknown to find us, there, in song.

Mamoyi

(for my son, Daniel)

The child is sleeping,
folded in among the brown boughs of my arms,
and a promise, formed beyond language, drawn upward
like sap through a pith, stirs through me.
In its slow course, i feel a vow so deep
it does not reach the flower and fade of word
but leaves me steeped, resined, in its truth.
Because i wish this child, awake, a man,
to know that he can keep, lifelong,
the trust, the self-astonishing joy that he has now
and he can draw from them the strength to make
his true path from the place i am
to where he will become, for his own child, a tree,
i vow: these boughs will never break.