First Night

We brought that newborn home from Maimonides

and showed her nine blue glittering streets.

Would she like the semis with hoods of snow?

The precinct? Bohack’s? A lit diner?

Her eyes were huge and her gaze tilted

like milk in a pan, toward shadow.

Would she like the tenement, three dim flights,

her crib that smelled of Lemon Pledge?

We slept beside her in our long coats,

rigid with fatigue in the unmade bed.

Her breath woke us with its slight catch.

Would she approve of gray winter dawn?

We showed her daylight in our cupped hands.

Then the high clocks began booming

in this city and the next, we counted for her,

but just the strokes, not the laggards

or the tinny echoes, and we taught her

how to wait, how to watch, how to be held,

in that icy room, until our own alarm chimed.

Copyright Credit: Poem copyright ©2012 by D. Nurkse from his most recent book of poems, A Night in Brooklyn, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Poem reprinted by permission of D. Nurkse and the publisher.