Everything bleeds if you think about the
possible places the line or the brush can go.
Twin baby girls, back in hospital two
weeks after birth. Bird-sized babies in doll
beds in a darkened room. Their mother
folded into a window seat. My son-in-law
and I trade visits—one of us always at the
house for the three-year-old who carried
a virus from daycare home to his sisters.
What might have happened then, unthinkable.
What might yet happen, unthinkable.
If you let it bleed, if you let the wash
wash open and spread, you cover the page
with colors that bleed into each other as
your mind bleeds into your mind
and you think of how to protect
the impossible to protect, the big brother,
the twins, their parents; a son far away
with his own, private devils, and the son in
San Francisco whose wife goes to work
at a hospital where she is lead advisor
to the chaplains who minister to patients,
and she too ministers to patients who, no
matter what she does, will or will not die.