At eleven days
my son does not know river.
Even the window-light is too much,
the way he squeezes his lids tightly
shut from it; flinching
from this second birth,
this time into blue,
into a sky he cannot touch
but that meets the edges of all things,
pressing itself to both hill and rooftop
while at the same time stretching
away from him
until clouds shrink smaller and smaller
through its wideness
and birds seem to wither to moths
in the flown distance to nightfall.
My son sleeps in his basket
while at the river’s edge
the dried pokers of bulrushes bend
with the sway of grass
and frogs croak in the thicket,
spawning from their singing
a hundred black eggs into the water.
It’s here my husband crouches,
treading watercress and clover.
Here, where the willow at dusk
is not enough,
nor his own self portrait
rippling to pieces
on the water’s surface,
that he comes to craft a pen
for drawing;
to flay the husk of a reed
to smoothness,
carve an arrow end of nib,
hollow pith
from the fluted mouth of reed
to hold ink in place of water.
At eleven days my son
does not know river.
Cannot yet imagine a body of water
that can carry a baby in its swell,
suspend him, once again,
uncribbed and weightless.
He does not recognise the river
on his father’s body
when he returns home,
not the sweetness
of trodden grass and pollens,
or the watermarked line of silt
at the bottom of his trousers
where he waded in without him.
He does not see that his father
kneels beside him
holding the reed pen
drawing his little clenched fist.
He sees only ringed-light,
as if swimming underwater
with eyes open
towards the surface of breath.
