Stir the  vast dragon of sky, itself.

The child, my own child,

wrapped in a blanket to still him

while we do what we want to heal him—

the rainbow might

have come sooner. Wild, and—

compared to us—

helpless. It might have undressed

so that we’d feel loved— it’s that simple.

We could have been gathered

by the generative depth

to its arm

of aquamarine light, and remembered

to ourselves. Love’s

rainbow from heaven’s grass bed

for does and fawns!

I can’t know the earth’s heart

of ash

fed to dense earth. Or its clear

yellow spigot

from its crest upon crest

of warm lamps. Rainbow’s little

blue hatchling, with scored flesh. 

The coca leaf fortune-teller

Listening, snowing,— please listen:

there’s rapture

during winter’s remembering-weather, the color

of nature’s changed life.

I’m sorry,

and not like the old woman

who threw a chicken bone

from her soup our way.

Her seat on the train-rail, used-electronics

for sale on her blanket.

The muddy ice… steam rises from her soup

with the habañero in the pot

for warmth. Her granddaughter shits

in a red plastic bucket behind her, so typical—

travel-sketches and self-scrutiny. We’ve been wrong.

Except what departs us as flame

to the sun and stars

in the deepening pattern:

our bodies, forming themselves in delicate

reciprocity

with the tricycle-taxi

named Goliath. My child will get born,

galaxy upon galaxy, he’s a human child. 

Sarah Vap is the author of American Spikenard, which won the 2006 Iowa Poetry Prize, and Dummy Fire, which won the 2006 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. her poems can also be found online at La Petite Zine, HOW2, and Blackbird. She lives on the Olympic Peninsula with the poet, Todd Fredson, and their son.