[Technical Climb]   [The Waning]    [Birds]
[Kindling]    [February]

Technical Climb
for Tom

I watch you ascend the rock face.
As each finger accepts its crack

and knob, needs the imperfections,
I follow the contour of your hips.

Held loosely in the webbing
of pine green belts, we are joined

by heavy nylon, protected in complex routes
of friction. I feed the rope to you, following

a speed, a pattern so familiar
you are freed, suspended by fingertip

and toe. From chalk caked between torn nails
to the tones of our voices against granite,

the rock is cold, mottled in lichen
and shadow. Slipping, you release sounds

so close to sex, I respond, bear down,
braking the loose end of rope, and breathe

in a dust of chalk and soil. You will not fall.
I have prepared to accept your weight,

move with you, learn
the intimacy of stone.

The Waning
    (for our newborn)

Early morning, hungry and sucking
on small knuckles, you wake me,
and through the east window
a slim moon appears in the open, winter sky.

Come, child, remind me that this moment
will pass, and because I can't hold it,
I'll hold you, and laugh, as the moon
tricks me into thinking it waxes.

And you, my sweet Maeve,
you grow larger, brighter,
as if my arms may be suddenly
too small to hold you.

Birds
    for Tom

It's not so much the flight--
for our baby
who sees walking upright
as a kind of miracle--

but how suddenly they occupy
the sky. Today it is seagulls
common glaucous, fishing the sound
for smelt, fishing close to this ferry
that carries us from island to mainland
to island again--and if we are willing to risk the cold,

our daughter
will point them out, stretch her arm,
her whole body
skyward.

        Most crossings we have stayed indoors,
        accustomed to the cabin, its dull heat.

But our daughter has learned to point.
Risk the wind, her gentle pull
tells us, Risk the wind. And we do.
We follow this small, pointing hand,
into the cold,

and there they are--

first one,
then a cluster, then one again--
chatter leading them
as much as their beautiful, tilted wings--
and our laughter
so sudden
as if today were the first day
you loved me.

Kindling
for Tom, on our 5th, the wooden anniversary

All around me, sap collects into jewels
as the deep yellow veins of post and beam
darken to red. Squared off
and cinched into a home, each fir
still turns with something
I might call desire-and today,
our fifth anniversary, we are thinking
of wood: as symbol, as gift.

What can I give you? You who lifts
and caresses wood, who hauls and chops-
you who comes home with a flurry of sawdust
in your hair, whose very smell is the smell
of what has grown tall, clear, and strong?

What can I give you, who knows fir and cedar
as if they were some part of your own anatomy:
the calluses on your hands thick with resin and memory?

Our daughter is asleep in a bed
shouldered by wood and sap and silence.
Before she wakes, I will go outside.
I will chop kindling into sticks and wedges
and unnamable shapes, if only to remember
that wood, if anything, is change.

I will lay the small clutches under our ledge
so you will be sure to find them.

And when you place them in the hearth,
in autumn, when the first snow falls,
the smoke will circle into sky

and in a house so full of change,
the crackling-the snap and music of light-
will be sure and round as laughter.

February
    for our son

The light of morning
reaches in to touch the couch,
armchair, my shoulder, as I nurse you,
the days lengthening toward spring.
This is the season of groundhog,
of planting, the quickening
where seeds ripen and grow.

Last year, and the one before,
and the one before that, I longed
for light, for the yellow blossoms
that divine themselves
from soil, ash, the unimaginable
darkness of worm and burrow.
I longed for the Valentine rose
whose open petals
can convince us of anything.

But this morning, your body,
heavying itself toward sleep,
and the ice outside, forming
and reforming into crystals and flakes
and mirrors of February light,

I remember the sleepless
hours before dawn, when you
fussed and wrestled, until I lifted you,
until the crook of my neck
felt your soft hair,

not the hair
of a man, but a boy, a baby,
whose body still folds into mine, whose quickening
heart will settle again and again towards sleep.

There will be time for planting, for watering,
for growing, but this morning, let the blossoms
wait. Let the ice settle in and the clear song of the wren
be silent. I am listening to my child breathe.

Copyright @2000 Kate Reavey