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Alcaics
For my niece
Like any infant, hard to conceive except
Through unlikeness: Hair unlike your brothers'
Merthiolate, cap of brown fibers,
Water-swept, scrolled, on your head's a fine small globe
Wherein your daydreams ripen like cottonwood's
Bell drops whose seed nodes, pressed in among the silk,
Warm days will float loose . . . embryonic
Substance of fantasy, spreading forests
Across the map and fold of the temporal.
In filament and layer, new cell and eye
Compare, and double. Thumbprint, heart, jaw
Strengthen, becalmed in their coded webbing,
As do the tiny eggs with which you are born.
Almost at once, you must start to hum and whir
With sight, take on coherent body,
Gaining a little each day as you see
The woven world -- bright, dark -- that unravels in
Faces sewn with the features expressing soul;
Vibrations moving up and down you,
Somewhere (or later) perceived as singing;
Voices submerged in tremblings of hunger, touch;
Warm breast at which you breath in long risings then
Long naps that make you fainter, float off,
Till you cry out to be anchored somewhat.
Hard to assemble more than a moment of
Stasis, yet you suffer more the change in change
(Blurred shapes of boys who turn about so).
Smile at them. You are the future turning.
My summer wish, may you recover after
This some eerie elf-glints off your childhood hour;
Spellbound by unbidden images
That waken the mind when the room is darkened,
Flare forward, through our old life, new creature.
Excerpted from Ghost Ship. Copyright© 1996 by Mary Kinzie. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this poem may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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