The Room in Which My First Child Slept

After a while I thought of it this way: It was a town underneath a mountain crowned by snow and every year a river rushed through, enveloping the dusk in a noise everyone knew signaled spring— a small town, known for a kind of calico, made there, strong and unglazed, a makeshift of cotton in which the actual unseparated husks still remained and could be found if you looked behind the coarse daisies and the red-billed bird with swept-back wings always trying to arrive safely on the inch or so of cotton it might have occupied if anyone had offered it. And if you ask me now what happened to it— the town that is—the answer is of course there was no town, it never actually existed, and the calico, the glazed cotton on which a bird never landed is not gone, because it never was, never once, but then how to explain that sometimes I can hear the river in those first days of April, making its way through the dusk, having learned to speak the way I once spoke, saying as if I didn't love you, as if I wouldn't have died for you.