We Will Need Many Bones

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In the morning I take my daughter 

into the mountains and I show her

there are beautiful things tangled

into the webs that hold us. 

Yes they have their cages but 

                       here is clover                  here is fire

                       here is what it feels like to be held. 

I give this world to her 

with its teeth and its terror. When night comes, 

we stay under the covers with the curtains low and dark. 

I gave her to this world.

Soft, small, she’ll need to live in it now,

there’s no getting around it. A quirk of existence is that 

you have to see it through. There are many reasons

to come to the mountain and only one road to get there, 

where the air smells like sap and soil and the river

ambles through on its own time and moss goes 

on growing and the forest does not carry that pandemic of pride — 

this is the world I will give her.

Below us cities seethe and boil. They slither and slur.

You know when they drove out the snakes

it was just us driven from the trees. In Ireland 

they burned those too.

These are things you know are real, I tell her —

Beard Moss and Old Man of the Mountain

are a truth inherent.

I teach my daughter the plague 

and pestilence of empathy. A wildness of mind 

that spreads to your bones to hold you over in winter.

We will need many bones for the coming night. 

There is still a case to be made for our continued existence:

A woman hushes her dog so the baby won’t wake. A friend stops by 

just to do the dishes. To fold the laundry,  to hold your child 

through the night. On the floor by the stairs someone lays a blanket

beside you and their body on top of it so you won’t be alone. 

We are made of these small mercies. Lord knows 

I am not self-made and I could make many worlds 

of the people who fed me —

Maybe even this one. Maybe even now.