until she was completely outside of me

and the creature—thing—that had held me helpless

simply dropped me and turned away,

as though I were no longer interesting to it,

or tasted bad, as though suddenly remembering

urgent business elsewhere. And I felt I was again

the agent of my life; it was mine, and the new life

laid on my stomach after I’d staggered to the bed

was mine, too, I would have to learn

what she needed and how not to harm her.

But how could I protect her

from whatever had mastered me so completely,

opening my body ruthlessly to bring her down

into this world, how could I keep her

from that thing if it wanted to unmake her?

That morning of her birth I felt it close to me,

forcing out the sweat and screams, and I knew

it would have killed me if it had to, for her sake,

for those few hours it loved her

like a mother, as it had once loved me in order to get me out.

Knowledge

KNOWLEDGE

Even when you know what people are capable of,

even when you pride yourself on knowing,

on not evading history, or the news,

or any of the quotidian, minor, but still endlessly apparent

and relevant examples of human cruelty—even now

there are times it strikes you anew, as though

you’d spent your whole life believing that humanity

was fundamentally good, as though you’d never thought,

like Schopenhauer, that it was all blind, impersonal will,

never chanted perversely, almost gleefully,

the clear-sighted adjectives learned from Hobbes—

solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short—

even now you’re sometimes stunned to hear

of some terrible act that sends you reeling off, too overwhelmed

even to weep, and then you realize that your innocence,

which you had thought no longer existed,

did, in fact, exist—that somewhere underneath your cynicism

you still held out hope. But that hope has been shattered now,

irreparably, or so it seems, and you have to go on, afraid

that there is more to know, that one day you will know it.

California Street

CALIFORNIA STREET

The two drunks have staked out a spot on the steep sidewalk, backs to the brick wall,

one thrusting his legs out so that pedestrians have to round a parking meter to avoid them,

the other curled with his head in the first man’s lap, beside them two pint bottles,

obviously empty now since otherwise the one still upright would be drinking, and not

looking balefully at each person passing, as though he’d asked for money and they’d refused

to give him anything—though in fact he hasn’t asked, unless you consider that his presence itself,

his stained pants and filthy Levi’s jacket, the long tangle of graying beard, the stink rising from both of them