Those years the bed felt like a boat,
and our limbs were always pressed against
the limbs of sick children, the hair in the mouth,
the stumbling, floral, immense, down the hall
for the sticky, sickly cherry-flavored medicine.
One coughed, then another, one turned
into a dream which made them moan in terror.
And the awake dry-mouthed mother who
believes/has learned the dream is merely life.
But what joy in that wide bed, the birds in their
dawn chorus, the trickster ones who sang
in the middle of the night as if to say moon
was sun, time was not or would not ever be
as it had been. An owl coughs from a tree.
A child coughs back. Later we would think
we had thought this forever—our bodies tied
to them as if by thin moonlight threads,
but it was only a season, a rotation. The
swallows’ nests left behind each year to
crumble into dust, littering the back porch
with their intricate broken weaving.