And: Still
I am a child of
no one alive,
no one who
can remember
my name.
Fathers,
mothers,
grand,
and great —
they are gone.
My child, will you consider this:
His name was Aylan, three years old.
Washed up, face down in a red T-shirt on a Turkish beach.
On the way to a country that already
denied him asylum.
__
I was thinking about attention. Not being there.
And I didn’t notice what happened.
The last two eggs simply
fell out of myself, tumbling —
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A hospital CEO, rushing to attend a series of meetings
in Perry Iowa, accidentally
left her daughter in a minivan in 90 degree heat.
__
It’s evening and people are still jogging, as if they’re running out of time.
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My child, will you consider this:
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I wouldn’t hold her.
Couldn’t.
Baby girl.
I’d have to give her back.
She’d
never be mine. She’d
always belong to another. Why
feel that: cradle until she
cries and
give her up?
Curled in arms, rocked, just to return
her. No:
I place tips of fingers on her cold toes.
Size of my fingernail they were.
She didn’t seem to notice. Or, maybe, she seemed to accept it.
Gazing through me she was. As if I weren’t
there. I’m of two minds: the smallest orchid,
just discovered in a cloud forest:
unnamed. I almost wish
we had never found
it.
__
No childe, but I assemble (Old French a(s)semble-r)
the list I would have made:
Prenatal vitamins
Folic acid
Bathroom scale
Fertility monitoring device
Donor egg program
IVF
Asleep, I once dreamt of a blonde child — page-boy hair cut,
head tilted sideways as if habitual, with me; sea-blue eyes.
Waving at me — he was mine, my boy. Was he waving hello or
goodbye. He never returned. The frame tight,
no
perspective.
__
Does the lotus
really close its petals at night and sink underwater
to rise and open at dawn? On second thought: don’t tell.
One could argue the brilliance of Velázquez was that
even his infantas were depicted with profound individuality,
so lifelike Philip IV supposedly
barked What, are you still here?
Painted in a flash of brushstrokes
—abstract up close, always on the verge
of dissolution.
Now.
And: still —