The thing about children is:
they disappear.
They disappear as they appear.
More themselves, less yours.
Here the baby is on the table,
kicking his silken, pillowy legs,
looking you in the eyes, squirming,
farting, smiling.
Their past, leaving them for good,
is ever more with you—
a kind of distributed
emptiness fills the rooms
where they used to coo
and call ma, ma, ma.
Bins of plush, sticky animals,
a grimy wooden stove, silence
where the current of play
once flowed. Now I hear
traffic streaming into the future
and the lost birds, the cardinal
and the mourning dove, too.
