What Birds Don't Know

When I found a dead bluebird in the backyard
yesterday morning, I cried. I thought of my baby
napping inside and examined our Chinese sumac
for a nest, something left behind.

Soft fall, the hum of broken bones:
the sound of a bird determined to rise.

I gathered towels from the line
as the skies darkened to signal
a storm. It is fearsome to be alone
with something dead.

When I saw one dark blue line on the test,
I cried. I'd been certain I was this time.
Instead the process begins again.

Blind faith: the way we mix flour, eggs, and sugar
with the expectation that it will result in cake.

I read once that an egg always hatches
at dawn, every bird born hungry.


The Quiet Pain


We've been trying since February. Now it is autumn
and you've begun to try for baby number two. A month went by,
nothing. And you began to write infertility poems.
A few weeks later, I discover the truth: You are pregnant again.

What the reddest hue of morning reveals: the foal born overnight,
nursing at its mother's body. What the black-ink sky delivered.

When you are full, you do not understand emptiness.
The tremor of dawn in October: transparent, cold
as the dewy gourd on your front stoop, the gradual aging.
You understand it like you understand the moon, observing
but never setting foot on it. You have never spoken your name
in that hollow space and heard it echo back.

The snap of scissors cutting squares of fabric for a quilt,
the quiet pain of creating, beginning.