A Larger Country

Dumb Luck

There are some things I should tell you
beforehand: I was born on a bed
covered quickly with a quilt.  I stepped

my bare feet into the new world
of a lamp-lit room in the country.
Because of a broken driveshaft we stayed,

my mother and I, among the witch-hazel
straddled houses and the buzzard-heavy
poles rising upward like wooden angels.

She had meant to rest on the bleached
linens of the Sisters of Mercy
hospital, and if only I had not come early

I might have been named Olaf
or Sven after one of the three doctors
in town.  Why does any of this matter

you wonder, what is the point
of unwinding the threads of this life
I will never have?  My mother wanted

a daughter so at five I dressed flowers
with my hair and answered to Margaret
as she watched my face darken

with all the coming furies of boyhood.
If they had conceived me sooner
I might now remember my father

taking his streaked hand to my back
and lifting me into the stunned air
of April, although common sense suggests

I wouldn’t have remembered the moment
nor his face or the light rain tapping
its fingers on our shingled roof

like a deaf man pounding Chopin
away on the keys of an unstringed piano
because he believes what he was told,

that there is joy in our sheer movement
of a thing from A to B, that a sound
made realizes its purpose when it fills

a silence because that is what we do
when we are born.  We waken and cry
to the silent walls and a radio gone hush,

to the earthbound rooster and hens
bent in the yard because we are finally
in the world we always said we wanted.