In Childhood

things don't die or remain damaged

but return: stumps grow back hands,

a head reconnects to a neck,

a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic.

Later this vision is not True:

the grandmother remains dead

not hibernating in a wolf's belly.

Or the blue parakeet does not return

from the little grave in the fern garden

though one may wake in the morning

thinking mother's call is the bird.

Or maybe the bird is with grandmother

inside light. Or grandmother was the bird

and is now the dog

gnawing on the chair leg.

Where do the gone things go

when the child is old enough

to walk herself to school,

her playmates already

pumping so high the swing hiccups?

Source: The Artist’s Daughter (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2022)