In a light chocolatine room 
with blackout windows, 
a loud clock drowns in soft dawn’s

Animals aren’t afraid the way we are. They don’t imagine danger. If danger comes, an animal becomes more alive, using its stored-up more-animal-self reserves. If the danger is fatal, it becomes the most alive it’s ever been, using up its entire being in those last moments. 

You never understood me until you watched me wash the inside of the well, with clean well water and invisible soap that dissolves the dirt and then clumps up and floats on the surface, suddenly iridescent. 

Noticing now how trees in twilight gather 
closer, more in command than you know them to be, 
snags the eye on advancing time foreshortened, 

“Is it raining there?”
your voice on the phone
wondered for no reason

You must not show her face. Only the hands
where each granite planetary knuckle
slowly pales as if submerged in water, stripped down as after seizure,
those hands that now hold nothing.

(You had a plan for me. You wrote in your notebooks—you plotted, reasoned, schemed. to bring me into being. (But reason is a fragile wing).

These are the objects, the touchable—table, refrigerator, chair,
grease-splattered whiteness and woodgrain.
And here is the sound of the baby muttering and cooing,

Out of the imagination.
Out of the brooding brain.
Out of the urban nest, lined in desires scaveng'd from

Wherefore the cutworm, that consumeth not what he
   destroys,
that sunders below the leaf, that razes at the spindle,