of sleeping pills. Each one white

as the snapper’s belly I once watched a man

gut by the ice bins in his truck, its last

bubbling grunt cleaved in two

with a knife. The way my uncle’s rabbit

growled in its cage, screamed

so like a child that when I woke the night

a fox chewed through the wires

to reach it, I thought it was my own voice

frozen in the yard. And then the fox,

trapped later by a neighbor, which thrashed

and barked as did the crows

that came for its eyes: the sound

of one animal’s pain setting off a chain

in so many others, until each cry dissolves

into the next grown louder.

Even if I were blind

I would know night by the noise it made:

our groaning bed, the mewling

staircase, drapes that scrape

against glass panes behind which

stars rise, blue and silent.

But not even the stars

are silent: their pale waves

keen through space, echoing the dark

the way my father’s disappointment

sags at my cheek, and his brother’s angers

whiten his temple. And these

are your mother’s shoulders shaking

in my arms tonight, her thin breath

that drags at our window where

coyotes cry: one calling to the next

calling to the next, their tender throats

tipped back to the sky.

Four Marys

Four Marys

Madonna del Parto, ca. 1460, Piero della Francesca

Are the drapes drawn open or being closed?

Each of the heavy, velvet wings is clasped

in the hands of a little angel, a little man really,

in shades of plum and mint green that frame

the birthing tent’s opening for a girl

who retreats into or emerges from the dark.

It isn’t clear: the perspective is such

that if I cover the painting’s

top half with a hand, Mary steps forward;

if I cover the lower, she shrinks back,

her blue bodice split at the bulging seams

to show the pear-white cut of her linen shift,

the great weight of the child she is about to bear

and later bury. And even if I didn’t believe

the child would rise again, I would believe the artist

had seen such fear paint a girl’s face

when the eldest women in the village

were called for help, and fresh straw brought in

if there wasn’t a bed, and hot water, and rose oil to rub

over the hips, and vinegar and sugar water

to drink, and hog’s gut and a thick needle

to sew her up with later. Even if I did not believe

in Mary’s joy, I would believe in her pain, the quick flick

of her thoughts turning to the sister, or the cousin,

or to her own mother who’d died giving birth,

the baby, too, not making it, for the birth

was in winter: ice so clogged the village’s

deep ruts that the midwife’s cart slipped