all of you so tender, you hung over me,

over the nest of the stitches, over the

splitting and tearing, with the patience of someone who

finds a wounded animal in the woods

and stays with it, not leaving its side

until it is whole, until it can run again.

The Line

When we understood it might be cancer,

I lay down beside you in the night,

my palm resting in the groove of your chest,

the rachis of a leaf. There was no question of

making love: deep inside my body that

small hard lump. In the half-light

of my half-life, my hand in the beautiful

sharp cleft of your chest, the valley of the

shadow of death,

there was only the present moment, and as you

slept in the quiet, I watched you as one watches

a newborn child, aware each moment of the

miracle, the line that has been crossed

out of the darkness.

The Fear of Oneself

As we get near the house, taking off our gloves,

the air forming a fine casing of

ice around each hand,

you say you believe I would hold up under torture

for the sake of our children. You say you think I have

courage. I lean against the door and weep,

the tears freezing on my cheeks with brittle

clicking sounds.

I think of the women standing naked

on the frozen river, the guards pouring

buckets of water over their bodies till they

glisten like trees in an ice storm.

I have never thought I could take it, not even

for the children. It is all I have wanted to do,

to stand between them and pain. But I come from a

long line

of women

who put themselves

first. I lean against the huge carved

cold door, my face glittering with

glare ice like a dangerous road,

and think about hot pokers, and goads,

and the skin of my children, the delicate, tight,

thin top layer of it

covering their whole bodies, softly

glimmering.

Poem to My Husband from
My Father’s Daughter

I have always admired your courage. As I see you

embracing me, in the mirror, I see I am

my father as a woman, I see you bravely

embrace him in me, putting your life in his

hands as mine. You know who I am—you can

see his hair springing from my head like

oil from the ground, you can see his eyes,

reddish as liquor left in a shot-glass and

dried dark, looking out of my face,

and his firm sucking lips, and the breasts

rising frail as blisters from his chest,

tipped with apple-pink. You are fearless, you

enter him as a woman, my sex like a

wound in his body, you flood your seed in his

life as me, you entrust your children to that

man as a mother, his hands as my hands

cupped around their tiny heads. I have never

known a man with your courage, coming