curiale chronicles: 2008

Monday, July 7, 2008

Poem

Siren

Her mother’s own voice has always changed:
It cracked like a boy’s when she was young.
As she got older, it squeezed out thin helium curls.
Eventually, it split her throat down the middle
like chopping in two a dried out melon,
leaving her with the thirsty half (the woodwind
half floated away like steam).
I knew her briefly as a girl with a laugh like a door hinge.
Till she became sandpaper; till she became feline.

I think of these iridescent vocal qualities
as I stare at the daughter we’ve made (she’s
smiling in her sleep) and wonder about her own
future sounds.
Right now, as we wait for the first songs from her throat,
her body is furiously growing.
Change constantly thunders through her,
which perhaps
is why her voices thus far have been explosive in nature.

Soon her drooling gurgles will straighten out.
Her grunts will find their groove.
The breathy sighs I take for initial attempts,
will actually be attempts- single word commands,
the naming of things.
She will laugh at something funny, and her laugh
will be tonal- might have a root, a third, and a fifth.
She’ll learn to bend it, to plead like a minor key.
I’ll be helpless, a ship at sea- she, a little siren
steering me toward her crib.

Right now, however, she merely twitches
on the couch next to me.
She stretches and curls up, stretches,
the strange baby dance of lengthening.
My wife says that the baby looks more mature today.
A mature looking ten-week old.
We laugh, and quiet each other with fingers to lips.
I put my hand on the baby,
it covers her entire body.
Beneath my fingers her little lungs fill and deflate
rapidly, like terrifying little balloons.
And her heart, which is roughly the size of a grape
flutters like a captured bird,
or a metronome gaining speed.