Pieta.

for P. H. T.

At the start they were lodestones, were miraculous.

Had she yielded to her in-laws and named him Nicodemus,

he would never have forgiven her later as a teenager

when what others call us matters, so she named him Peter

and they grew. Had she not been born

with the crotchet of a bird, a downy woodpecker 

powerfully drilling the bark of a tree here and there

and absorbing the shock of each quick blow,

she might not have recognized the singular force driving him.

She resolved to listen more and they grew closer.

Seasons repeated themselves, things remembered were forgotten.

In the course of a river there are bends;

they were, each of them, a bend. He grew out of himself

in to someone she did not know and could not talk to,

so she watched him from a distance that widened

and, although it was difficult, she kept stretching across space

like shadows. Sometimes while he slept

her fingers wandered the cotton fields of his hair

and she lamented the small boy who use to climb into the soft

of her arms when he hurt. Perhaps it was because he still talked

in his sleep with the voice of a child, or it was in the way his chest fell,

exhausted, which convinced her that hiding somewhere

in the dark body of this young man was that small boy.