Birch in the Dark
- Birch in the Dark
Now and then the coals at the bottom pulse gold, as a gust of the child he was fans the bulk and wrap of the man to come.
I’ll always see the fist of embryo first, lit like a ghost on the screen, alive, curled, yes, even smiling into the webs
of his miracle mitts, still floating in the stink and knobs of the teen, not because I conceived it so much
as because I witnessed every increment doused in the fear that any random wind could take him down. Each muscle
he gains masks the wisp mothers keep, and every shining strand invites destruction from without. Why do we
so seldom track the kind that comes along the blood? Why always fear for the delicate whorl of circuitry
haloed in helmet or moving down a darkened street for anyone to mow? We wake again and again in a heat
of dreaming them downed from a blow, a hard piece of the earth hurtling toward our softest part. Tonight as I walk the block
in early November dark, the gold planet of a streetlight rises behind a birch in the yard of neighbors who lost [End Page 97]
a five-year-old to cancer. We hoped light for him in the flock of origami cranes brought to his bed, and though I never saw
them made or hung or taken down and home at the end, I’m sure I see them now filling the birch with borrowed light,
gold trembling in their folds and points. Cruel as the thought may be, it comes anyway with or because of the waves
of sorrow: one mother will not have to see the boulder of a man close around her wisp of boy, small visage tipped
to the dark’s gift of cranes, cranes, cranes lifting into glow and sift of sparks, whirled, expanded, whispering,
and not the hot little knob buried at the center of those doomed to tread ordinary sidewalks at dusk
until the two who have made him can no longer see how heavy his shoes will become. When I get to the birch
in the dark, I can see there are no cranes, only the drying leaves, gold shot through their last flat surfaces,
and behind them, blackout shades, drawn as tight as man-made springs allow, though glow seeps anyway from the rims,
and a light in the basement isn’t blacked. Someone’s down there doing what has to be done. [End Page 98]
Leslie Adrienne Miller’s most recent collections of poetry include Y (Graywolf Press, 2012) and The Resurrection Trade (Graywolf Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Crazyhorse. Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, she holds degrees in creative writing and English from Stephens College, the University of Missouri, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Houston.
