Secrets in the dark? Once they were woken,

Each by name. Now they have become each other—

Anonymous except for injury,

The beautiful and headless side by side.

Was this where all lost childhoods go? These dim

Abandoned rooms, these crude arrangements staged

For settled dust and shadow, left to prove

That all affection is outgrown, or show

The uniformity of our desire?

How dismal someone else’s joy can be.

I stood between the speechless shelves and knew

Dust has a million lives, the heart has one.

I turned away and started my report.

II.

That night I dreamt of working on a ledger,

A book so large it stretched across my desk,

Thousands of numbers running down each page.

I knew I had to settle the account,

Yet as I tried to calculate the total,

The numbers started slipping down the page,

Suddenly breaking up like Scrabble letters

Brushed into a box to end a game,

Each strained-for word uncoupled back to nil.

But as I tried to add them back together

And hold each number on the thin green line

Where it belonged, I realized that now

Nothing I did would ever fit together.

In my hands even 2 + 2 + 2

No longer equaled anything at all.

And then I saw my father there beside me.

He asked me why I couldn’t find the sum.

He held my daughter crying in his arms.

My family stood behind him in a row,

Uncles and aunts, cousins I’d never seen,

My grandparents from China and their parents,

All of my family, living and dead,

A line that stretched as far as I could see.

Even the strangers called to me by name.

And now I saw I wasn’t at my desk

But working on the coffin of my daughter,

And she would die unless I found the sum.

But I had lost too many of the numbers.

They tumbled to the floor and blazed on fire.

I saw the dolls then—screaming in the flames.

III.

When I awoke, I sat up straight in bed.

The sweaty sheet was twisted in my hands.

My heart was pounding. Had I really screamed?

But no, my wife was still asleep beside me.

I got up quietly and found my robe,

Knowing I couldn’t fall asleep again.

Then groping down the unlit hall, I saw

A soft-edged light beneath my daughter’s door.

It was the night-light plugged in by her bed.

And I remembered when she was a baby,

How often I would get up in the night

And creep into that room to watch her sleep.

I never told my wife how many times

I came to check each night—or that I was

Always afraid of what I might discover.

I felt so helpless standing by her crib,

Watching the quiet motions of her breath

In the half-darkness of the faint night-light.

How delicate this vessel in our care,

This gentle soul we summoned to the world,