Afterward, your hands
looked criminal. But righteous machines,
the merciless clicking of clocks and cars
whirred on, faithful
to their warranties…
Blood mottled your mother’s moth-gouged sheets.
I had never wanted a child before.
I used to think pain was like a Rome apple,
small and full as a new breast.
The vegetal underwash of green.
Our daughter would have grown fast, like me.
On a Tuesday in April, her ballet teacher
would have smoothed her dark storm of hair
and taken her hand, found me after class:
though young, the girl was ready
to dance en pointe. I would have recognized the teacher’s smile,
the child’s nameless gaze, poised
at my word—at the edge
of form’s liquid slavery—I remember
the pink of sucked-candy satin. The grace purified
in will and pain. We stuffed clotted wool cumuls
into our slippers, felt them darken
as we pushed, arched, turned.
To say I wanted you now would be
a confession: I loved the needle
that scratched the worn Tchaikovsky
that trembled on and bleated out
and would not stop, would not stop playing.
