Five Dreams of Offspring

You are bathing the baby
In a tin basin used
For boiling hominy.
You dip a cup
Beneath the surface
And tip it
Over the baby's head,
Tracing the curve
From crown to nape
With your thumb.
And again, this time tracing
The ears. Papery things,
Each with its crescent-shaped
Nimbus of down.

Brown leaves
Cough at your feet
As if to ask What business
Is this of yours? As if
To keep you from knowing
To lift the baby from the water
And hold her so she believes
She has taken flight.
The brown leaves want
To wake you, but first
They want to call your attention
To the heap they have formed
Where you stand,
Each dark shape a waiting hand.

*

She will dry quickly in the sun.
She will cry for shade,
And when you shade her,
Watching her eyelids lower,
Leaning into her slight heft
That rests easily
Against your chest,
You will scan the yard
For answers—a mound of leaves
Like earth atop a fresh grave—
To the question that quickens
Your shallow breaths.

*

In a tin basin
Used for boiling hominy,
You are bathing the baby,

Brown leaves
At your feet. She blinks
When flying shadows cross.

Outside of words,
She thinks you and she
Are birds

Like all the others,
Your wings and her small tufts
Bobbing in and out of water,

Splashing beads of light
That drop back into the basin
After brief flight.

*

Wind would sweep the sky
Of its faint clouds, thin
As soap that has been handled
To a papery thinness.

And it would trouble the leaves
Which, motionless, seem
Not just to watch, but to hover
On the verge of speaking.

*

You are bathing the baby.
Brown leaves cough at your feet.
Papery things
Like the bodies
Of crabs that have dried
On the beach, which
Is where you take the baby
Certain by now she is yours,
Born of your waking fear,
Your slow waiting.