Cry of the Stars

Little Bean is learning how to grasp
and hasn’t got the hang of it yet;

things keep slipping
through her tiny fingers

and i’m imprudently
melancholic, wondering how soon
she’ll need to learn
to just let them go.

then again

do we ever learn, in the end?
have we ever grasped anything
in the first place?

i’m not strong enough to hold you
against the world, or death,
or even tomorrow—still

i think,
i think

i would like to hold you anyway.

When my mother told me she loved me,
I thought I needed translation.

Sweetheart? she tried, but shook her head.

I looked it up: darling, baby—
Or word by word: heart, liver, treasure, cowrie.

Precious treasure of the liver. Sweet heart
of the child. A music box, a seashell, a dumpling, a blanket,
a pair of cupped hands, a cradle, a womb—

the heart, the liver, the baby
a box for safekeeping, but

is there anything safe about a baby?

Xinganbaobei, she repeated, drawing a circle
at her chest, opening it up, showing me
myself nestled inside, as vital as any viscera:

in me, of me, she said, my sweet baby,
the child of my heart. You know?

And didn’t I?

Late June, and by my apartment porch
the scent of flowered vines sends me back
eleven years, reeling, to a riot of mowed grass
and sunshine on skin:

I’m running through shifting shadows
with you again, while your mother
cuts tomatoes in the kitchen
and the white duck wanders the backyard.

Pale pollen on fingers, clear nectar
lingering on tongue-tips, we ran, breathless
and blurry—

Somewhere beyond the clotheslines I lost you:
dark curls disappeared into billowing white,
eclipsed by heat and wind.

Did I lie down and close my eyes
in the center of that bright and whirling world?

Have I slept for eleven years, or is it now
I am dreaming?

I think of your face behind fluttering sheets,
your mother’s voice at the patio door—

I turn; the wind drifts; I breathe
again, unlocked.

canada goose leaps from the garden pond
into a spring storm, calling like my nana

with an arrowhead stuck at the back of her mouth;

she feels it catch every time she speaks.
she buckles her neck around the pain.

how long can one man elude winter?

go on while I rest, he said, and
she flew south without him.

now she remembers she lost something.

Theodore! she calls through vernal rain,
point of an arrowhead crying across the sky,

looking, looking, looking.

Long months of darkness saw
your careful shaping, each detail intricate
as a passerine’s nest, your snowdrop petal fingers
and sugar maple veins: winter’s
lovestruck gift to summer.

The day you arrived,
Zephyrus whirled his brothers aside and
swept us into his arms, laughing,
while we kissed your new skin like gentle sunlight,
a sudden touch of joy that stirred the daffodils
and woke the sleeping thrushes—

something of you made us wild
with life, and our fevered happiness went singing
like the wind, and we told your name
to the flickering moon, and we whispered it
to the tender rain that fell,

and it tangled in wet branches—
our love among white blossoms, nestled
in the crook of an arm,
some sweet place in the dark
where the dogwoods had begun to bloom.