Click here to listen to Doreen Gildroy read this poem. When the child wouldn’t come into existence what was I to do? I knew it in a different way, then.
He said he had never heard
these stories
before we began, didn’t care—
but now in his grief
they seemed everywhere.
*
I was missing you,
and then the dove.
Singly—not in a pair—
in his usual place.
I watched him
on the garden wall,
thought the absence
of the other.
Whatever the reason,
I took it to
remind me of myself
and what I was missing.
It flew up
in the face of
all my instinct,
my raw animal comfort.
*
His was a tender embrace.
There was nothing going on
around it,
no fury
driving me on.
In spite of the pain
I was offering something.
Some days this seems
everything I understand.
