I praise the brightness of hammers pointing east

like the steel woodpeckers of the future,

and dozens of hinges opening brass wings,

and six new rakes shyly fanning their toes,

and bins of hooks glittering into bees,

 

and a rack of wrenches like the long bones of horses,

and mailboxes sowing rows of silver chapels,

and a company of plungers waiting for God

to claim their thin legs in their big shoes

and put them on and walk away laughing.

 

In a world not perfect but not bad either

let there be glue, glaze, gum, and grabs,

caulk also, and hooks, shackles, cables, and slips,

and signs so spare a child may read them,

 

In the right hands, they can work wonders.

 

There is one grief worse than any other.

 

When your small feverish throat clogged, and quit,

I knelt beside the chair on the green rug

and shook you and shook you,

but the only sound was mine shouting you back,

the delicate curls at your temples,

the blue wool blanket,

your blue face,

your jaw clamped against remedy--

 

how could I put a knife to that white neck?

With you in my lap,

my hands fluttering like flags,

I bend instead over your dead weight

to administer a kiss so urgent, so ruthless,

pumping breath into your stilled body,

counting out the rhythm for how long until

the second birth, the second cry

oh Jesus that sudden noisy musical inhalation

that leaves me stunned

by your survival.

 

In her room at the prow of the house

Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,

My daughter is writing a story.

 

I pause in the stairwell, hearing

From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys

Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

 

Young as she is, the stuff

Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:

I wish her a lucky passage.

 

But now it is she who pauses,

As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.

A stillness greatens, in which

 

The whole house seems to be thinking,

And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor

Of strokes, and again is silent.

 

I remember the dazed starling

Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;

How we stole in, lifted a sash

 

And retreated, not to affright it;

And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,

We watched the sleek, wild, dark

 

And irridescent creature

Batter against the brilliances, drop like a glove

To the hard floor, or the desk-top.

 

And wait then, humped and bloody,

For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits

Rose when, suddenly sure,

 

It lifted off from a chair-back,

Beating a smooth course for the right window

And clearing the sill of the world.

 

It is always a matter, my darling,

Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish

What I wished you before, but harder.