Bold Type: Poem by Cynthia Zarin





		When at night you woke I sang to you, light in my arms and your cheek wet, and the shore we rowed toward was sleep. Two a.m., four a.m., the sky brightening, our passage abandoned as the last star to steer by faded. Milk and honey, trumpet vine, the hours swelling in the thick June heat as I crossed the wide floorboards, singing the only song that settled you, as if you knew even then the journey we were on, that we were leaving, or that I was, and you would be forever heading into open water, past gray shallows where the wrecked ship molts, splintering at the high-water line, turning from boat to felled kite: a beast whose rigging should have let it fly, but which withered instead like the willow judged by Michael, "Let the Lord rebuke you." Shadow. Inland. Four, five, six summers pass. Too heavy now to carry when you stir, you rise instead, and walk, somnambulist, around the room. I sit up late. Asleep, you seem to know your way. Porpoise who swims in the watercourse we made, I stand on grief's upper deck and hear you ask, in the silence of the song's long shade, "Whose boat is it anyway?" "It is yours," I think, but do not answer. The magnum of Veuve Clicquot bought to toast the Big New Year was left undrunk and put away until your August birthday, when in the life we weren't sure would come (as if time might stop just for us) you pottered up and down the half-lit dune, passing it among the crowd while sticky babies tottered underfoot, and the ruined sky recorded the sun's rapid plunge from view in pumpkin hues the exact shade of the champagne label. Then turned flamingo pink as stardust, the bubbles flew. Now summer shed, the bottle sits amid crumpled flotsam on my desk. Aggrieved, it wears a lampshade on its head, a reveler who'd hoped the revel wouldn't end, but settles for (though doesn't get) a glimpse of revelation in its stead. Nevertheless, it light things up, including this (raised to you) chipped coffee cup.

		Excerpted from The Watercourse by Cynthia Zarin. Copyright © 2002 by Cynthia Zarin. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.