Small Death

(after Billy Collins)

I thought of her small death so often,
tangled in the tubes and wires of the dark,
that it came to have shape and strength,
more than a weak cry in an incubator
and the blue mottled skin of a defect heart.

Her small death had an entrance and exit
wound any bullet could pass through
at ordinary times and leave
on the prickly rush of strangled tears.

Her small death held both grief and gain,
the imagined perfect baby stolen, replaced
as a stranger with broken and retarded
parts, weak muscles and difficult growth.

Her small death had a heart-lung machine
and a pacemaker, it had a ventilator hissing,
and alarms that you could not turn off.

In the harsh fluorescent light I took her
small death to sleep with me, and in every
corner of the nursery it hid from hope.

In the dark of night it became the hope
of the next day and all the days to follow,
and moved into the future in the beat of her heart.

***

My daughter Meghan had open heart surgery when she was 5 months old, this comes from that time and all the times it comes back to me like it was yesterday. She is 12 years old now.