Children's Hospital

Our sorrow had neither place nor carrier-away, and dared not hover over the child whose breath opened as transom of a frail house. Nor could we put our sorrow in the dictionary, for ghastliness already shot out its own defining in rags of fired light. Pigeons would not sleek it over their dirty coats, nor fly sorrow against the aviary's sharp fence. Each day bridgeless, each night birdless, all the nocturnals needless at the expanse of our nightwatch. But wake at the moon, we could, mumbling,are we in a horror show?—inside of sleep our shock-white minds caught on reels where a child's body breaks the heart and the mother can't know if she counts as a mother. I don't know if the child heard what wept at the bedside, orderlies snapping smelling salts from chalky bullets against all the mothers falling, all the fathers under what each branch let down: there's a hidden weight to snow.