A Month After Her Birth

The bed is a cloud, and I am afraid
to step off into the cold otherworld,
to take her with me into the vaporous after.

I nestle in backwards, pose fetal and pull
her into the cocoon of comforter,
to the bulge of hot breast,
back to the body. I rest
and bide and tend.

Spring shows in white spurts
through the yellowing curtains,
dust stars diving into her breath-stream,
man in green-smelling work boots,
red splash of tulips in his fist
and a new hazel rimming
her muddled eyes like a moss.

I swaddle us both
and plummet

out to a concrete porch, facing the street.
I see an old friend pass
in a pickup, a case of beer clinking in his bed.

Goodbye, I say to him and the shadow-dappled
homes standing casually still
as if no earthquake occurred,
goodbye to infant grass fingering snow.

I breathe the rust of the screen door
as it closes me in shadow, and squeeze
my new flesh, so long in the making.