Weekly, I track your progress: Stranger, growing with abandon in the taut economy of my belly. There are dangers— a stumble, strange chemicals, consuming incorrect foods, some say. My hair returns to its natural color. I avoid a simple pleasure: glass of cheap wine dark as a January evening. A reflection of something learned from my mother. Sickness, exhaustion, anticipation of the first movements. Slow, a dance in deep water. The months stretch ahead, one long syllable; the last petals from the magnolia tree drown in ditchwater as in a dream of white deer moving further into the dark, indeterminate forest.

The Grand Canyon, 1990, lobbing rocks off the drop. His mother’s hands on his shoulders, her worry of feet slipping. He understood that every death is your own, every witnessed near-miss, nail-mark frantic on the coffin-lid. I learned it a different way: peach pit caught in the safe-keeping of my throat, the minute of panic, knowing the clockwork monotony of the body can stop. That we’re two smaller shadows submerged in another, large like a pockmarked night sky, each star unbuttoned to let fall.