Poem

October 10, 1999

Birthday poem

Desert-sun dawn

hard light flat

as a grave-digger’s spade

chips of bird song flake

off morning heralding the 58th

anniversary of my birth.

Ruth-less day. An iron hammer

smashes a clay vessel

I stretch awake

first birthday absent a mother.

At dusk, sister and I

speak by phone, orphaned

by the same transit. Emptiness

yawns beneath our speech

stretches, sets its claws

in the space between us. I complain

of common loss aloud.

She cracks a flinty laugh

a spark in the darkness

of my ear. “Not to be pessimistic”

she snorts, “odds are you’ve had more birthdays

with her than you will without.”