| WHEN YOU WERE BORN By Colin Dodds Cardiopolis Floating through the world dispensing permission unknowingly Cranes raise houses, office boxes bivouacs for a war not yet agreed uponBuildings like the stock exchange blossom in the snow At midday in midtown towers pose for their ruinThe city from any distance at all— its surges, precipices, idiosyncratic ridges repetitions and anomalieslike an EKG in three dimensions like the shape of a lifeThe more you look at it the harder it becomes to even ask which parts matter When You Were Born for Miriam Bridget DoddsWarm weeks, fat men with chests out bob down the street like sails full of windDigitized fetal heartbeats mingle with cicada-chitter and dry leaves across concreteMy landlady peeks from her door to see the blood moon in eclipse Inside, my wife struggles near the end of her nine monthsBusy, tired, travelling, poor—distance is the rain, the surface of the contract I sign, crossing my fingers like that means anythingNature steps from her accustomed highwaysides window boxes and green-scummed piers in civilized September her voice rattling my pores – Marking time in fluids, there were clear warnings day-long classes and dreamsPassing a night in a B-52 bomber the whole horizon erupts, and the pilot says “They’re making room for a baby”The temple crumbles as the infant escapes past the distorted corpses of her co-adventurers through cobwebs and familiar perils with a golden artifact of untold value somewhere on her person – It arrives unsurprising as autumn in the soupy air of an Indian summer right about when we stopped calling it thatIt sends me spinning, rushing baffled among car-service dispatchers in the last September we had such men – A lot at once A greeting card and trench warfare and it’s all one thingTerror and love mingle, fuse in the bloodgleam congealed into hair, shaven for surgery but just a patch, then skin open and closed all at once eyes shaped by ten thousand generations of looking away and looking againNo more delay no distance or affectation I catch sight of my own face, the one that doesn’t care about the music or food I eat what I think of the state of civilization and whether I’m ecstatic or in endless, ash-black agonyThat’s the one who shakes her head at the wondrous dreams of meaning dreamt not disappointed but amazed at the dreamingThat’s the one who continues after I disappear – The great chain of weeping catches and draws the scenery along The first few weeks, her tiny hands attack her through an unknown territory to sleep the blue vein of dreams visible under her cirrus hairAwash in mercy and emergency the minds of mother and father attack them regularly murmuring urgent assurancesIt is easier to soothe an infant than our own mindsAnd one afternoon, pondering an invitation, we speak of our newborn daughter’s wedding and weep because having thought of it, it’s occurred and our lives already come and goneSomewhere, an archaeologist packs mud on our last standing complaint – For my tiny daughter, hunger and lamp fascination are undivided within a single unbounded question and a single unbounded knowingTogether, we listen to the shortwave static of the November radiator and I hum the things I don’t want to explain that she blessedly couldn’t understand if I triedTiny bright eyes relay all the majestic world back to an administrative office in heaven across distances spanned in a stanza or never spanned at allShe turns bagels into giggles and squawks like a happy parrot toothless mouth full of lightDoing nothing much, she informs me: We are not here for anything We are here, and everything is for that About the Author:  Colin Dodds is a writer from Massachusetts. His novels include WATERSHED and The Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer praised as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” His work, appearing in more than three hundred publications, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Anthology. The poet and songwriter David Berman (Silver Jews, Actual Air) said of Dodds’ poetry: “These are very good poems. For moments I could even feel the old feelings when I read them.” His book-length poem That Happy Captive was named a finalist in both the Trio House Press Louise Bogan Award and the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, and his screenplay, Refreshment, was named a semi-finalist in the American Zoetrope Contest. Colin lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter. You can find more of his work at thecolindodds.com. | |