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.
