To Gratitude
You expand my pajamas, stain my nursing kimono, seep from twisted sheets
between my knees until I rise.
You power the vibrating alligator that coerces the cheeks and tongue
of my two year old to talk.
Hand over hand, leg behind leg, you teach him to function while you sew
the broken helix on his chromosome fifteen.
You pack his instructions, toys and two lunches, and invent another
first avenue song.
You bend his tortus neck toward his swaddled brothers who barely wheeze
through endotracheal tubes.
Tapping tiny breastbones, you break the bradycardia that holds his siblings
here in plastic bassinets.
You secure his weight to my mastitic chest for our forty-third bus ride
from hospital to home.
You coat his saliva rash with petroleum jelly, coax him to eat a smashed avocado
and swaddle him, too.
Last look to the baby monitor screen — you crawl across carpet squares
and slide out the apartment door.
* * * * *
Leaves of Him
After the ruined den empties
of pea-sized blobs that used to be push pins
and a two-step cherry-wood library ladder
and a hand-woven rug, singed fringe waxy,
she pulls one book, indistinguishable
from other charred spines, off the shelf
and cracks open A Light in the Attic.
Stocking stuffer just before his death.
Corner folds, some dog-eared
deeper where he paused for laughing
or attending to a drink, a Manhattan
during the week, Budweiser on Saturday.
Hickory ash from pipe-smoked winters
smeared by friction ridges into channels.
Swirled sweat. Skin cells,
original carbon copies of him,
measured to the millimeter.
On “Hippo’s Hope” a tuna trail
from a sandwich stuck
with her holiday note
I love you Irishman!
that slid off the cellophane.
The same note, flattened
into the crease of “Whatif.”
She skims one fingertip
over brittle pages. Discard these leaves?
Finish the burn in a backyard heap
or tag-sell them to strangers
for their birdcages and charcoal grills?
Yet the most damaged sheets, scallop-edged
in brown and yellow, stinking
of smoke that smothers
pungent tobacco, harbor him.
She sends the book, sends the lot,
to be restored. When they return,
all of Silverstein will be
midnight blue.