For Pearl on her Eleventh Week

This Child


This child must face out. She is drawn
by lights and a sun
carved into the mirror’s frame.

This child flexes her fingers,
a ballerina in her tiny hands. When she cries
there is always someone to reach out.

She coaxes everyone in
to love. She is new to traffic and wind
and restaurants where rude people appraise her parents

for the way they ornament their bodies
thousands of years older
than the way such eye-rollers worship

their gods. This child could never belong
to those who worship such a shallow god,
she is so safe, so unfettered

by concerns of the petty or the stunted.
This child is passed from arms to arms,
she demands to be involved,

to see. Egrets fall
like parachutes from the sky,
little stuffed giraffes parade in circles

over her bed.
This child suckles with an abandon
known only those willing to be sated,

milk-drunk, while we sit in an old circle
all around the bed, a circle as old
as stories of the parents of our parents of

their parents, as old as tattoos;
as necessary as family and laughter. This child
starts to remember dreams and flops

into slumber after a short, good cry.
She curls over my legs
as she goes limp into sleep and dreams new

faces or passages from the body
of her mother. Her eyelids flutter.
Best not to move her then. Just feel

her little breaths, watch her face
wrinkle and ease, feel
the little papump

papump papump of her holy heart.


-- Bob Vance