Damn

A few days after she gave birth,

She sat by the window, nursing,

And she saw a sheet of paper

Float down from the sky to the yard.

Later, she carried her infant

Outside, and she picked up the scrap.

It looked like a poem. It had lines,

But didn’t rhyme. It made no sense,

Something about an old father,

A baby napping, a lizard,

And a woman taking a bath.

Since it had an infant in it,

She kept it. A few days later,

This happened again, then again

A few days after that. She kept

Them all, in a drawer, then a box.

She kept them in case she ever

Was telling someone about them

Only to be told she was crazy.

The poems were crazy. She wasn’t.

The world was crazy. She wasn’t.

She kept the poems as evidence.

She began to take note of when

They showed, reliably, three days

And about four, five hours apart,

Advancing completely by turns

Around the clock. Sometimes they fell,

Sometimes they were just there, paper.

Most of them were short. Some were long.

If she was somewhere with people,

She might find one in her pocket.

She decided they had to do

With her baby, somehow, they must

Mean something extraordinary

Was meant to happen through her child,

But her child was ordinary,

And her life was ordinary,

And then at some point she noticed

Without having really noticed

That the magical poems had stopped,

And she forgot about the box,

Until one day she found her child

Hunched over a sheet of paper

Looking puzzled, reading a poem.

Later that night, she looked under

Her darling’s bed and discovered

Another whole box of the things.

There was never anything said,

But she knew the poems had switched now,

And she suspected her child knew

That she knew and might have deduced

Or guessed that she had decided

That nothing need ever be said.

One day, she slid her collection

Under her child’s bed, side by side

With the box already filled there,

And that was it for her. Her child

Suffered considerably more,

Puzzling over drifting pages

And, in adolescence, timing

Their arrivals to the minute—

Three days four hours and twenty eight

Minutes apart. They never failed.

The boxes moved into the shed.

The child grew up, reasonably

Educated, and had lovers

And a few partners, a career.

One or two partners were informed,

But mostly the poems ended up

Filling boxes in storage sheds.

The child had a child, grew older,

Grew middle-aged, grew to be old.

Meanwhile, the poems kept arriving,

Uninvited, unannounced sheets

Filled with lines and lines of writing,

One more, every three days and change.

On a day approaching sixty,

The old child was found dead in bed,

With one last poem tucked in a fist.

Like the rest, it made little sense,

But was read out at the service,

As probably the child’s last thoughts,

Which it wasn’t, which were, Where will

All these damned poems go once I’m dead?