The World Beginning

My friend wakes early today/gathers her dress
from the floor where it slipped in the night/she drives
far to deliver a baby for someone who thinks

she is hell-bound and burning/The country held dim,
but she believes in first blossom/in women/still/
and how their armor is knit with a hand held toward/

Here is her arm/as if enough/She writes me/don’t
crumble/don’t crumble/I am going to
vomit/I do/and am sure it is the quell of you/sweet/

I did not want to make you in a world that weeps/
I sweep up plaster peeled from the bedroom wall
like tree bark/The goldengrove

unleaving/Sweet/are you grieving?/Your father broke
out in hives/throat swelled like a frog/All morning I hold
cold cloths to his back but they grow warm so quick/pull off

like skin/The results/insufficient/something in him
his body resists/Sweet/what passes through
blood?/Parts of me closed and did not crumble/

Your father wakes from a dream of white
light/fifty miles from Hiroshima when the bomb
exploded/his grandfather tasted copper/

I am a psychic mother from psychic
mothers/Mine planted flowers
right before I fell in love/still I love

this man/and you/sweet/though white love scorches
all that blooms/I hoped for a home
where love wasn’t harm/It is sweet I mourn

for/I cannot lie/I do like sweetness/like the way it tastes
and the roundness of my palm when I gather bark
by my bed/I flinch at sharp tongues/at the shrill

tang the robins wail before dawn/I have become
so good at making walls/sweet/but I did not want
to build a home without air/Tomorrow I will

open all the curtains/press my hands to the glass
of the picture window/release my weight against it/let it break
into shards/and crumble/and puncture us with sun/

◆

Joy Shall Be Yours in the Morning

Warmhearted, but ever so white, winter nests in its barked sky. I’ve stitched our house with oranges and pine. Night frames us, we hold our smiles. Here, winter — here, my hearth. All darkness meant to promise spring, it is difficult to keep imagining it. I sleep under my green quilt. I cover my daughter with it. We count the flowers, pilled cotton. One day it will no
longer be winter. Words we cannot see. Words we putter in prayer.

“The World Beginning” borrows a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins “Spring and Fall.”
“Joy Shall Be Yours in the Morning” takes its title from Kenneth Grahame’s “Carol of the Field
Mice” from Wind in the Willows.