1.
There is, to her mind, only one.
Or only
one that’s built to scale. Had they known
sooner. Had the only man to whom the CAT scan
yielded
so much detailed information not
been out of town that week. Had those few sticky
platelets moved
with just a shade more expedition through
the infant artery . . . The parallel life
will not
relent. But look, we may say to her, look
at them tied to their breathing machines, they do not
cry
(because of the tubes you’ll say, you’re right, to you
the silence is dreadful). To you the vicious
calculus
abides no counterargument: the oxygen
that supplements their unripe lungs destroys
the retina,
leaving the twice-struck child in darkness. What
must they think of us, bringing them into a world
like this?
2.
or want of an ion the synapse was lost.
For want of a synapse the circuit was lost.
For want
of a circuit, the kingdom, the child, the social
smile. And this is just one of the infinite means by which
the world
may turn aside. When my young daughter, whose
right hand and foot do not obey her, made us take
off
the training wheels, and rode and fell and pedaled
and fell through a week and a half of summer twilights
and finally
on her own traversed the block of breathing maples
and the shadowed street, I knew
what it was like
to fly. Sentiment softens the bone in its socket. Half
the gorgeous light show we attribute to the setting sun
is atmospheric
trash. Joy is something else again, ask Megan
on her two bright wheels.
3.
To live
in the body (as if there were another
place). To graze among the azaleas (which are
poison
to humans, beloved by deer; not everything
the eye enjoys will sit benignly on the
tongue). It must
have been a head shot left her ear at that
frightening angle and the jaw all wrong,
so swollen
it’s a wonder she can chew. Is that
where they aim, the good ones, when they’re
sober? At
the head? At a doe? The DNR biologist is
saintly on the phone, though God knows he’s not chiefly
paid
to salve the conscience (I have
bad dreams) of a gardening species stricken by
its own
encroachment. Fecundity starveth
the deer in the forest. It fouls the earth it
feeds upon.
Fecundity plants the suburban azalea, which
dies to keep the damaged deer in pain. I mean
alive.
4.
For want of rain the corn was lost.
For want of a bank loan we plowed up the windbreak
and burnt it
(you must learn to think on a different scale, they told
us that). For want of a windbreak and rainfall
and corn
the topsoil rose on the wind and left. God’s own
strict grammar (imperative mood). I meant
to return
to joy again. Just
give me a minute. Just look at the sky.