BIRTHDAY POEM

Birthday Poem

There are children born from love.
I do not know why I was born.
To think you exist because your
parents existed in one interval of time
in the early morning hours between
sunrise and the purple night is impossible.

It’s ridiculous to imagine your mother
as a woman attracting your father, inviting
him inside herself. The two of them, pink
with youth, laying breathless, the thick fragrance
of sweat and sex hovering above the bed in the
warm room.
Outside the window a wailing train, a sly fox
stalking the hen house, the cry of the neighbor’s
baby cutting through the still cool of the night.

I do not know why I was made—
a spark from nothing.

Born

When I was very young, I didn’t think about
being a child in terms of catastrophe. From the pale
light of the womb, there was the cacophonous
riot of the heart, mother’s voice like that of
a tinny echo, and a muted baritone I took at
first as a tenor horn but later recognized as father.

It doesn’t take long to acclimate to one’s surroundings
in the ghost fog of the womb. I didn’t perceive myself
as a baby. I considered myself a small force, a human
without experiential knowledge of love or hate or indifference.

When I was born, there was incredible white light,
dissonant voices—
all I remembered for many days is being carried by
father and the paroxysm of weeping that I took to be
histrionic in nature.

Getting born means settling for what’s in front of you.
From father’s shoulder, I took in my surroundings. A
mug left on the counter; a red afghan tossed across the arm
of the sofa; a wooden rocking chair in the corner of the room; a
book; a lamp.

At bedtime in a cradle near mother and father’s bed, I
watched father undress, mother turn out the light. Father
fell into worrisome sleep, his chest rising and falling sharply,
and he whispered ragged, severe words.

A Lesson in Reading

It’s night.
A sway of stars has been brushed across a sky black like the color of figs.
There’s a moon. It hangs bolted over the cold mountain.
The man is out for a walk.
He didn’t bother putting on a coat before setting out from the house.
This is because the house is too warm. The night air feels good at first.
Halfway around the block, the cold seeps in, and the warm house sounds good again.
The woman is at the house reading. It’s some book about a woman who
goes through something traumatic. It’s a sad story, the woman told the
man when he asked about the book.

The man is troubled. The woman shouldn’t read such sad things.
She already doesn’t sleep. But the woman shook her head. You don’t
understand, she told him. This woman in the book has to go through
this trauma in order for her to realize she’s supposed to allow
herself happiness. You have to read until the end.
In the end there’s light, but you have to read through the darkness first.

Third Wheel

He told me that there are only
three hummingbirds in Florida. Of course,
when Steve told me this what he meant was there are only three
species of hummingbirds in Florida. But for
a moment I was saddened for that third
hummingbird all alone. The other two were surely lovers.
Lovers who suspended themselves in the thick
atmosphere—humidity like a brick—dancing around
the only hibiscus in the yard.
And the other hummingbird, flitting neon through the yard, thoughts
drifting towards the Galápagos, Lonesome George, hummed
on swift wings vibrations—morse code for animal kingdom: a
dirge for the deserted.
for Steve Espamer

Triptych of a Marriage

1.
Night comes and settles in
among the trees and flowers—

lights come on, soft, some of them
strung over chairs, others in a tree.
This is to create an illusion of romance.

Suddenly, it’s late; getting into bed
seems like the only thing left to do.

There’s a man. He’s in the family—a permanent fixture.
If you took him away, the balance
in the house wouldn’t be right.

Now the man’s asleep, or rather, falling
asleep. His eyes are closed but his mind is still going.
He hears the woman get into bed.
She sighs, adjusts her body until she’s comfortable.

Sometimes when they’re like this they hold hands, or she’ll drape
her leg over his. This always makes the man feel like she still needs him.

2.
In the night when it’s still full dark
the woman awakes; she doesn’t sleep well.

She gets up and goes downstairs.
Sometimes she paints. Sometimes she paints
fantastic things with color. Other times the
colors are subdued and muted: whites and grays
or colors that remind others of earth.

3.
These nights when the woman is painting, the man
stays in the bed thinking about how the woman
held his hand, kissed his forehead.

Sometimes he gets up, looks out the bedroom window
at the lamplit street below where there’s a cat prowling
the dark street or a deer, lithe and strong, who trots nimbly
into the neighbor’s yard to eat the tulips.

Kyle Doty is an educational researcher and instructor at a large virtual school, as well as an adjunct professor at the American College of Education. He has published three poetry collections: "Hush, Don’t Tell Nobody" and "Winter Lightning" with Apprentice House Press, and "Violence: Metamorphosis" with Adelaide Books. Kyle lives in Roanoke, Virginia with his wife, artist Sharayah Doty, and their children. His days are overseen by an imperious feline named Catticus and a Great Dane named Mary Oliver.