21

Dearest

Jean Valentine

this day broke
at ten degrees, I swim
in bed over some dream sentence lost
at a child’s crying: the giant on her wall
tips the room over, back:
I tell her all I know
the walls will settle, he’ll go.

Holding her fingers, I watch the sky rise, white.
The frost makes about the same lines
on the same window as last winter,
quicker, quieter... I think how nothing’s happened,

how to know
to touch a face to make a line
to break the ice to come in time
into this world, unlikely, small,
bloody, shiny, is all, is God’s good will
I think, I turn to you,
and fail, and turn,

as the day widens
and we don’t know what to do.