At first a rumble, then thunder cracks apart the morning
and suddenly I remember half-waking last night
to a heron shrieking
as a coyote made a meal of stilts and feathers—
though in my stupor, I misheard it as drunken boys
yelling Hooray! slowly over and over again,
as if death was jubilant
with a broken singing in her mouth.
Now lightning welds four forks of vanishing
into a sky that has, overnight, lost a bit of winged blue.
When we are lucky, we forget peril’s appetite.
But the August my daughter labored to bring her first child
here, a force and counterforce wrestled in the mystery
of her body and its absence still occupying mine.
Today the marsh steams, brightening green.
And there, further out along the brambled roadside,
I remember last summer, how blackberries
scattered behind a trio of women
as they carried their overfilled buckets home.
And I remember writing then, This baby will destroy the whole of her.
I should know. Speak to me of love and I’ll answer ruin
begins as a brimming sweetness, threatening to spill.
